John Markoff - The Abolition of Feudalism - Peasants, Lords, and Legislators in The French Revolution-Penn State University Press (1997) PDF

THE
ABOLITION
OF
FEUDALISM
Jo h n M arkoff
THE
ABOLITION
OF
FEUDALISM
P easants, L ords,
and L egislators
in the F rench R evolution
T he P ennsylvania S tate U n iversity P ress

U n iversity P ark , P ennsylvania
This publication has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, a
federal agency which supports the study o f such fields as history, philosophy, literature,
and languages.
Library o f Congress Catak)ging-in-Publication Data
Markoff, John, 1942-

The abolition o f feudalism : peasants, lords, and legislators in
the French Revolution / John Markoff.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-271-01538-1 (doth : alk. paper)
ISBN 0-271-01539-X (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Land tenure— France— History. 2. Peasantry— France— History.
3. Feudalism— France. 4. France— History— Revolution, 1789-1799-
-C auses. I. Title.
HD644.M37 1996
333.3'22'0994— dc20 95-50657
CIP
Copyright © 1996 The Pennsylvania State University

All rights reserved
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Published by The Pennsylvania State University Press,
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F o r my parents,
M axine a n d S o l M arkoff
C ontents
List o f Figures and Maps ix
List o f Tables xi
Acknowledgm ents xvii
1. Introduction: Grievances, Insurrections, Legislation 1
2. Seigneurial Rights on the Revolutionary Agenda 16
3. Three Revolutionary Programs 65
4. On the Ideological Construction o f the Seigneurial Regime by

the Third Estate (and o f T\vo Seigneurial Regim es by the
Nobility) 145
5. Forms o f Revolt: The French Countryside, 1788-1793 203
6. Rhythms o f Contention 271
7. H acking Insurrection through Tim e and Space 337
8. Revolutionary Peasants and Revolutionary Legislators 428
9. Words and Things: The French Revolutionary Bourgeoisie

Defines the Feudal Regime 516
10. Conclusion: From Grievances to Revolution 561
Appendix: Sources for Peasant Insurrection Data 613
References 621
Index 655
L ist of F igures and M aps
Fig. 6.1 Insurrectionary Events by Month 271

6 .2 (a ) Incidence o f Rural Insurrection by Date 276
6.2 (b) Incidence o f Rural Insurrection by Date 277
6 .2 (c ) Incidence o f Rural Insurrection by Date 278
6 .2 (d) Incidence o f Rural Insurrection by Date 279
6 .3 (a) Proportions o f Rural Insurrection by Date 283
6 .3 (b) Proportions o f Rural Insurrection by Date 284
6 .3 (c) Proportions o f Rural Insurrection by Date 285
6.3 (d) Proportions o f Rural Insurrection by Date 286
6 .4 Insurrectionary Events (by month) with M ajor
Com ponents o f Peaks Indicated 300
6 .5 Daily Incidence o f Insurrection: July-August 1789 301
6 .6 (a) Peak Periods o f Insurrection 302
6 .6 (b) Peak Periods o f Insurrection 303
6 .6 (c) Peak Periods o f Insurrection 304
6 .6 (d) Peak Periods o f Insurrection 305
6 .7 Insurrectionary Events (1661-1789) by Day o f W eek 307
6 .8 Insurrectionary Events (1788-1793) by Day o f W eek 312
6 .9 (a) Types o f Insurrectionary Events by Day o f W eek 315
6 .9 (b) Types o f Insurrectionary Events by Day o f W eek 316
6 .9 (c) Types o f Insurrectionary Events by Day o f W eek 317
6 .9 (d) Types o f Insurrectionary Events by Day o f W eek 318
6.10 Mean Actions per Event, June 1788-June 1793 323
6.11 Insurrectionary Events by Month 325
6.12 (a) Monthly Proportions o f Insurrections, 1789-1792 328
6.12 (b) Monthly Proportions o f Insurrections, 1789-1792 329
6.13 Monthly Proportions o f Insurrections, 1788 and 1793 330
8.1 Bailliages with Insurrections, July-August 1789 437
8 .2 Land Conflict with Feudal A spect 483
8 .3 Intracommunal Land Conflict 484
8 .4 Timing o f M ajor Legislative Initiatives on Seigneurial
Regime, Tithe and A ccess to Land, and o f Insurrections
over T hose Issues 488
8 .5 Religious Events: Violence Against Persons 507
X L ist of F igures
Map 7.1 Regions, Provinces, and Select Towns 341

7.2 Bailliages with Antiseigneurial Events: Early Months
and Peak Episodes o f Antiseigneurial Activity 4 0 3 -4
7.3 Bailliages with Selected Forms o f Insurrection,
June 1788-June 1793 406
L ist of T ables
Table 2.1 Subjects M ost Widely D iscussed in Cahiers, Ranked

by Frequency o f Discussion 3 0 -3 2
2.2 Grievances Concerning Burdens (% ) 41
2.3 Grievances on Seigneurial Regime (% ) 41
2.4 Docum ents that Discuss Particular A spects o f
Seigneurial Regime (% ) 43
2.5 Frequencies with Which Docum ents H ea t O ften-
D iscussed Seigneurial Subjects 55
2.6 Relative Frequencies with Which Seigneurial Subjects
are Treated by Parishes, Third Estate, and Nobiiity 59
2.7 Seigneurial Subjects o f Relatively G reater Salience to
the Nobility than to the Parishes, Third Estate, or
Both 60
2.8 Seigneurial Subjects o f Relatively G reater Salience to
the Third Estate than to the Peasantry 63
3.1 Demands Concerning Burdens (% ) 68
3.2 Demands Concerning Institutions Other than
Taxation, Ecclesiastical Payments, and Seigneurial
Rights (% ) 69
3.3 Ratio o f Propensity to Demand “ Abolish" to
Propensity to Demand “ Maintain" 69
3 .4 Parish and Third Estate Documents Demanding that
Seigneurial Rights B e Abolished (Without
Compensation) or Maintained (% ) 74
3.5 Noble Docum ents Demanding that Seigneurial
Rights B e Abolished (Without Compensation) or
Maintained (% ) 75
3 .6 Parish and Thud Estate Docum ents Demanding that
Seigneurial Rights be Ended with Compensation Paid
to the Seigneur (% ) 92
3.7 Parish Cahiers Demanding Abolition or Reform o f
Specific Taxes (% ) 101
3.8 Reform Grievances Showing Concerns for Equity (% ) 104
L ist of T ables
3 .9 Tax Equity Concerns in Parish Cahiers: Reform

Grievances Demanding a Redistribution o f Tax
Burden (% ) 105
3.10 Parish Cahiers Demanding that Ecclesiastical
Payments be Abolished, Reformed, or Maintained (% ) 110
3.11 Parish and Third Estate Docum ents Demanding that
Seigneurial Rights be Reform ed (% ) 112
3.12 Noble Docum ents Demanding that Seigneurial Rights
be Reform ed (% ) 127
4.1 Other Seigneurial Rights D iscussed by Third Estate
Cahiers that D o or D o Not D iscuss a Particular Right
(mean number) 149
4.2 Demands Dealing with Other Seigneurial Rights in
Third Estate Cahiers that D o or D o Not Discuss a
Particular Right (mean %) 150
4 .3 Am ong Third Estate Cahiers Discussing a Particular
Seigneurial Right, Demands for the Abolition Without
Compensation o f Other Seigneurial Rights, for
Cahiers that D o or D o Not Call for the Abolition o f
the Right in Question (mean % ) 152
4.4 D ifferences in Numbers o f Distinct Seigneurial Rights
Associated with Particular Rights in Noble Cahiers 153
4.5 D ifferences in Discussions o f Seigneurial Regime
Associated with Discussions o f Church’s Financial
Exactions in Third Estate Cahiers 154
4 .6 Attention to Seigneurial Regime and Hostility to
Religious Institutions or Practices (Other than the
Tithe and Casuels) in Third Estate Cahiers 155
4 .7 Attention to Seigneurial Regime and Salience o f
Religious Institutions or Practices (Other than the
Tithe and Casuels) in Third Estate Cahiers 156
4 .8 Attention to Seigneurial Regime and Salience o f Tax
M atters in Third Estate Cahiers 157
4 .9 D ifferences in Discussions o f Seigneurial Regime
Associated with Specific Taxes in Third Estate
Cahiers 159
4.10 Grievances About Seigneurial Regime and Hostility to
Central Government in Third Estate Cahiers 161
4.11 D ifferences in Discussions o f Seigneurial Regime in
Third Estate Cahiers Associated with Other
Institutions Cited in Summary o f the Debate o f
August 4 ,1 7 8 9 164
4.12 Discussions o f Seigneurial Courts in Third Estate
Cahiers by Extent o f Discussion o f Other Courts 168
L ist op T ables xiii
4.13 D ifferences in Discussions o f Seigneurial Regime in

Third Estate Cahiers Associated with Discussions o f
Distinctions among the Orders 170
4.14 Third Estate Cahiers Discussing Communal
Rights (% ) 173
Associated with Discussions o f Communal Rights in
Third Estate Cahiers 174
4.16 Third Estate Cahiers Dealing with A spects o f the
Developm ent o f French Agriculture (% ) 176
Associated with Discussions o f the Developm ent o f
French Agriculture in Third Estate Cahiers 177
Associated with Discussions o f Nonseigneurial
A spects o f Land Tenure in Third Estate Cahiers 178
Associated with Concern with Industry, Finance, or
Com m erce in Third Estate Cahiers 179
4.20 M easures o f Association (Gamma) Betw een Third
Estate Discussions o f Individual Seigneurial Rights
and the Developm ent o f French Agriculture 183 -8 4
4.21 M easures o f Association (Gamma) Betw een Third
Estate Discussions o f Individual Seigneurial Rights
and Concern with Industry, Finance, or Com m erce 1 8 5 -8 6
4.22 D ifferences in Numbers o f Distinct Lucrative Rights
Associated with Particular Lucrative Rights, with
Particular Honorific Rights and with Other Rights in
Noble Cahiers 192
4.23 D ifferences in Numbers o f Distinct Honorific Rights
Associated with Particular Honorific Rights, with
Particular Lucrative Rights and with Other Rights in
Noble Cahiers 193
4.24 C o-occurrence o f Lucrative and Honorific Rights in
Noble Cahiers 194
4.25 Institutions Associated Only with Lucrative Rights in
Noble Cahiers 195
4.26 Institutions Associated Only with Honorific Rights in
Noble Cahiers 196
4.27 Institutions Associated with Both Lucrative and
Honorific Rights in Noble Cahiers 196
5.1 Frequency o f Events 218
5.2 Types o f Antiseigneurial Events 221
5.3 Types o f Religious Events 231
L ist o p T ables
5.4 TVpes o f Anti-tax Events 234

5.5 TVpes o f Anti-authority Events 242
5.6 Types o f Subsistence Events 245
5.7 Types o f Land Conflict 255
5.8 Types o f Counterrevolutionary Events 259
6.1 Peak Months o f Insurrection 282
6.2 Forms o f Insurrection in Periods o f Peak Activity and
in Quiet Periods (% ) 295
6.3 M ost Common Forms o f Insurrection During Peak
Episodes, Peak Months, and Peak Days (% ) 297
6.4 Number o f Months in Which a Type o f Event is
M ost Common 298
7.1 Regional Distribution o f All Events (June 1788-June
1793), Area, Population, and Communities (% ) 343
7.2 Type o f Events by Region, June 1788-June 1793 (% ) 345
7.3 Extent o f Regional Participation in Insurrection, June
1788- June 1793 (% o f Bailliages with Events o f
Various Types) 347
7.4 Ratio o f Percentages o f Events o f Specific Types to
Percentages o f All Events 353
7.5 Geography o f Events by Tim e Period (% ) 356
7.6 Space-Tim e Zones Disproportionately High in
Insurrections 362
7.7 W estern Participation In Revolution Compared to Rest
o f France: Insurrections o f Various Types (% ) 364
7.8 Forms o f Rural Mobilization by Social Contexts, July
1789- August 1789 (% oí Bailliages with Particular
Form s) 372-73
7.9 Events on Sunday By Region (% ) 390
7.10 Antiseigneurial Risings by Social Contexts at
Different Tim e Periods (% D ifference Betw een Low
and High Values o f Variable at Left) 400 -4 02
7.11 Types o f Rising by Social Contexts, June 1788-June
1793 (% D ifference Betw een Low and High Values o f
Variables at Left) 405
7.12 O ccurrence o f Insurrections in Same Bailliage B efore
and After Selected Dates (Q -coeffidents) 414
7.13 O ccurrence o f One Form o f Insurrection B efore
August 31,178 9, and the Same or Other Forms After
that Date in the Same Bailliage (Q -coeffidents) 416
7.14 O ccurrence o f Antiseigneurial and Counter
revolutionary Events in Western Bailliages 417
8.1 Prindpal Legislative Actions on Rural Issues,
Summer 1789-Sum m er 1793 4 5 2 -5 4
L ist of T ables xv
8.2 Events with Antiseigneurial A spect over Tim e (% ) 494

8.3 Antiseigneurial Events with Selected Characteristics
over Tim e (% ) 500-501
8.4 M ajor Legislative Tim ing Points, M ajor Peasant and
Parisian Insurrections 510
Acknowledgments
On the cover a solitary name stakes a claim that this book has a single
author; but the references at the bottom s o f the pages within show
something o f the community without which this book couldn’t e x is t The
footnotes indicate only som e o f what is ow ed to others. Gilbert Shapiro
thought up the system atic study o f the cahiers de doléances and, together
with Sasha Weitman, had carried out much preliminary work toward the
coding o f these docum ents when I joined them. It’s easy enough to thank
them for the creation o f an essential data set; I cannot begin, how ever, to
thank them for all I’ve learned from them. It’s been a long time since I
attended Robert Forster’s graduate seminar on the French Revolution, the
first course in history in which I’d ever formally enrolled, but it remains with
m e as a m odel o f how to work with students. Like others who w ere graduate
students in the same time and place, I found the sociology department
created by James Coleman and Arthur Stinchcombe a garden that in exile,
I’d hope to re-create.
Som e o f the analyses and arguments in this book and som e o f its w ords
had earlier versions as articles or talks and I found many people willing to
read these early drafts o f chapters. I’m grateful to all those who generously
gave m e com m ents on these versions: Silvio Baretta, Seym our D rescher,
Jack Goldsterne, Peter Jones, D. Carroll Joynes, John Marx, Peter M cPhee,
James Riley, Eugen Weber, Arthur Stinchcombe, Rainer Baum, William
Brustein, Lynn Hunt, Daniel Regan, Charles Tilly, Donald Sutherland,
Jerem y Popkin, Isser Woloch, Colin Lucas, Lloyd M oote, Sidney Tarrow,
G eorge Taylor, Sasha Weitman, Susan Olzak, Gilbert Shapiro, Norman
Ravitch, François Furet, and Harvey Graff. Later, others com m ented,
som etim es in extraordinarily generous detail, on com plete or nearly com
plete drafts o f the book: Arthur Stinchcombe, Peter Jones, Cynthia Bouton,
Carmenza Gallo, John Marx, Tim othy Tackett, Peter M cPhee, Anatoly Ado,
Ludmila Pimenova, Robert Forster, William D oyle, and Mounira Chañad.
O ther scholars managed to find the time to answer queries about their
ow n work or let m e make use o f their unpublished or even unfinished
research. For these and other sorts o f help I thank Timothy Tackett, M elvin
Edelstein, Anthony Crubaugh, Nancy Fitch, Cynthia Bouton, Jean Nicolas,
xviii Acknowledgments
André Fel, Bernard Sinsheimer, Donald Sutherland, Bryant Ragan, Steven

Reinhardt, Thomas Fox, Jeffrey M errick, Hilton Root, Lionel Rothkrug,
Lloyd M oote, and Sarah Maza. (The particular generosity in sharing unfin
ished wortc is obscured in my references by how much o f that work got into
print long before this book finally did.) Many, many others I can only thank
collectively— m y students, colleagues, friends— for putting up with m y
obsessions. Beyond the gift o f time taken away from their own projects for
which I thank all, I found the particular helpfulness o f scholars with w hose
ow n wortc I quarrel in these pages to be a m odel o f generosity. W here I
have not taken an excellent scholar’s advice, let it be called obstinacy, but
not ingratitude.
The University o f Pittsburgh’s Center for International Studies provided
essential financial support on a number o f occasions: I’m deeply grateful to
its director and associate director, Burkart Holzner and Thomas M cKechnie.
The endless revisions seductively invited by w ord-processing technology
w ere actually carried out by Josephine Caiazzo. Without her wortc, I’m not
sure that this book would ever have been com pleted.
C h apter
I n t r o d u c t io n : G r ie v a n c e s ,
I n s u r r e c t io n s , L e g is l a t io n
In the 1780s young m en seeking employment under Alpine lords used to

place notices in the ad columns o f the Dauphiné Announcements vaunting
their fine handwriting, their skill in mathematics, their moral character, their
knowledge o f Latin, their respectable families and, o f course, their grasp o f
the intricacies o f land surveys, the law o f fiefs, and seigneurial rights.1 In
1967, a villager in Upper Provence, w hose family had lived there a long
time, was heard to tell o f the day in D ecem ber 1789— the story was
now here written down in any detail— when a boisterous group o f villagers
marched to the local château, dug a hole in the courtyard, and informed the
lord that his continuing refusal to make a written renunciation o f his rights
would straightway lead to throwing him in. (M onsieur de Robert com plied.)2
1. Jean Nicolas, "Le paysan et son seigneur en Dauphiné à la veüe de la Révolution,” in

La France ¿ancien régime: Etudes réunies en Fhonneur de Pierre Goubert (Toulouse: Privat,
1964), 2:497.
2. Daniel Sofaldan, “Mouvements contestataires de communautés agro-pastorales de Haute-
2 THE ABOLITION OF FEUDALISM
In the 1780s a French lord could collect a variety o f m onetary and material
payments from his peasants; could insist that nearby villagers grind their
grain in the seigneurial mill, bake their bread in the seigneurial oven, press
their grapes in the seigneurial winepress; could set the date o f the grape
harvest; could have local cases tried in his own court; could claim particularly
favored benches in church for his family and proudly point to the family
tom bs below the church floor; could take pleasures forbidden the peasants—
hunting, raising rabbits, or pigeons— in the pursuit o f which pleasures the
peasants’ fields w ere som etim es devastated. It was a world that could
sustain the careers o f young men who would bring their knowledge o f
agricultural practice, o f law, and o f household finances to keeping the lord’s
affairs in order.
Betw een 1789 and 1793, the people o f the French countryside mounted
attacks on their enem ies; a very significant part o f these thousands o f
incidents w ere attacks on the claims o f the lords. At the same time, the
articulate, educated, and energetic m em bers o f the revolutionary legisla
tures in Versailles and Paris produced a stream o f words laying out their
blueprint for the new rural order. For those who lived through this time, it
was not just a diminution in the pow er o f a social group, but the collapse o f
a world. T hose who had lived in this world suddenly had new choices to
make and made them differently. One highly successful lawyer som etim es
in seigneurial em ploy, Philippe-Antoine Merlin, well known as collaborator
on one o f the last major legal treatises o f the Old Regime, found a new use
for his skills in serving as secretary o f the National Assem bly’s Com m ittee
chi Feudal Rights where he was chief architect o f the detailed legislation on
the seigneurial rights. Meanwhile in Picardy, François-Noël Babeuf, travel
ing quite a different road, abandoned the lords whom he had advised, and
found a new (and brief) life in championing the peasant cause as he
understood it, through proposals intolerable to any o f the governm ents o f
the decade o f revolution.
The sense o f a dramatic break was such a deep experience that erne
historian o f rural France could recall that when he was growing up in rural
Brittany in the 1920s the country people spoke o f the distant past as “ the
time o f the lords.”3 In how many villages was that experience recounted to
the young over generations— and, when recounted, with what alterations as
the events receded in time? We do not usually have easy access to the ways
in which the great upheaval was experienced in France’s forty thousand
rural communities but w e do at least know a great deal about what many o f
those villages w ere demanding at one early moment when they set down
Provence au XVIIIe siècle dans le témoignage écrit et h mémoire collective,” inJean Nicolas, ed.,
Mouvementspopulaires et conscience sociale, XVIIe-XIXe siicles (Paris: Maloine, 1985), 249.
3. Pierre Goubert, L'Ancien Régime, voL 1, La société (Paris: Armand Coin, 1969), 17.
Introduction 3
their grievances. The legislators o f the National Assem bly (1789 -91 ), the
Legislative Assem bly (1791-92) and the Convention (1792 -95 ), on the
contrary, have left us an elaborate written account o f their revolution, in the
form o f tiie written record o f the legislature as a collectivity— their laws and
the surrounding debates and reports by relevant com m ittees— as well as
such personal docum ents as letters, journals, m em oirs, and position-taking
brochures. This ocean o f words contains a great deal on the legislators’
view s on rural revolt and on the rights o f the lords.
The seigneurial rights w ere a central focus o f attention in the years o f
revolution. They w ere a principal target o f rural insurrection; they w ere on
center stage in the National Assem bly’s dramatic renunciation o f privilege
cm August 4, 1789; they w ere a continual bone o f contention betw een rural
communities who found the early enactments o f the legislators to be
thoroughly inadequate and legislators faced with continuing rural turbulence;
they w ere an essential elem ent in the revolutionaries’ notions o f the “ feudal
regim e’’ being dismantled; they w ere the concrete subject matter addressed
in the first legislation that tested the tensions inherent in the thorny
constitutional issue o f a royal veto (and they thereby contributed to the
difficulty o f em bodying the Revolution in som e monarchical form ); they w ere
invoked in the rhetoric with which those in high places addressed the
growing international tension surrounding the revolutionary state, a rhetoric
which imbued the revolutionaries with a self-righteous sense o f a national
m ission to liberate the victims o f feudalism outside o f France, altering the
character o f European warfare.
The assault upon the lords’ rights has been variously interpreted in the
historical literature but it is widely seen as a central elem ent in the entire
upheaval. For M arcel Reinhard, the struggle against seigneurial rights was
what gave the multifarious Revolution its unity.4 Albert Soboul, who view s
the seigneurial institutions within the M arxist conception o f the transition
from feudalism to capitalism, finds the attack on those rights to be a large
part o f what made the French Revolution “ truly revolutionary.” 5 Pierre
Goubert argues that the seigneurial regim e was a constitutive elem ent in
the revolutionary actors’ own conception o f the Old Regime. The National
Assem bly was clearly o f the view, he w rites, that what they called the
feudal regim e “ was one o f the foundations o f the Old Regim e.”6 For Jerome
Blum, the struggle against these rights was the French contribution to “ the
end o f the old order in rural Europe.”7 Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie has
4. Marcel Reinhard, “Sur l’histoire de h Révolution française,” Amales: Economies, Sociétés,

Civilisations 14 (1959): 555-58.
5. Albert Soboul, The French Revolution, 1787-1799: From the Storming of the Bastille to
Napoleon (New York: Vintage Books, 1975), 7-8.
6. Goubert, L’Ancien Régime, 12.
7. Jerome Blum, The End of the Old Order in Rural Europe (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1978).
proposed that what m ost sharply distinguished the rural risings erf 1789 from
the great peasant upheavals o f the seventeenth century was precisely their
focus mi seigneurial rights rather than the fiscal exactions o f the state.* In
Tocqueville’s search for the central issues posed by the Revolution, the
attempt to understand “ why feudalism had com e to be m ore detested in
France than in any other country,” as one o f his chapter titles has it,
occupies a strategic place.8 9 It was not, Tocqueville contends, that what he
calls the yoke o f medieval institutions was still strong. Rather, the centuries-
long growth o f the central state bureaucracy had to such an extent eroded
the public pow ers and responsibilities o f the lords, that their prerogatives
w ere now so many unjustifiable privileges, and therefore vulnerable.10
In this book, I shall address the ways in which insurrectionary peasants
and revolutionary legislators joined in bringing the time o f the lords to an
end and how, in that ending, the seigneurial rights cam e to be so central to
the very sense o f revolution as a sudden and radical break. I shall examine
French view s o f seigneurial rights toward the onset o f revolution and shall
then trace the subsequent actions o f peasants and legislators. H ow did
France’s peasants view their obligations to their lords? In what ways w ere
these particular burdens felt to be like the other obligations that weighed
upon them, especially state taxation and ecclesiastical exactions— and how
w ere they felt to be different? How did the nobility see these rights? Did
they defend their existence and, to the extent they did so, in what ways?
And the urban notables who cam e to national pow er in the revolutionary
decade— how did their view s resem ble those o f peasants (or o f nobles) and
in what ways w ere they distinctive? And what made the seigneurial rights
occupy such an important place in how they cam e to characterize France’s
past?
Peasant insurrection was a significant elem ent o f the collapse o f the Old
Regime. The French countryside teem ed with groups who challenged the
existing order and w hose continued turbulence for the next several years
posed difficult problem s for those who sought, in Paris, to assert their
claims to be at the head o f the new revolutionary order. The form s assured
in the mobilization o f the countryside w ere many. Small-town marketplaces
w ere occupied by country people demanding grain at prices they could
afford; lords w ere dragged out o f their residences and com pelled to issue
public renunciations o f their seigneurial rights; m onasteries w ere broken
into; administrative offices o f tax agencies w ere burned; arms w ere sought
as villages mobilized for self-defense against what w ere believed to be
8. Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, “Révoltes et contestations rurales en France de 1675 à 1788,"

Amules: Economies, Sociétés, Civilisations 29 (1974): 6-22.
9. Alexis de Tocqueville, The Old Regime and the French Revolution (Garden City, N.Y.:
Doubleday, 1955), 22.
10. Ibid., 22-32.
Introduction 5
imminent invasions by criminals or foreign armies or aristocrats’ lackeys.

Later on there was bitter and violent engagement on one side or or the
other o f the church that divided in its allegiances; there w ere risings over
conscription and other claims o f the new central authorities; there w ere
battles for access to land in which fences w ere knocked down, forests
invaded, and com m ons divided; less commonly, there w ere struggles in
which rural wage laborers sought better earnings. What role did the
seigneurial rights play among all the diverse form s o f peasant insurrection?
The Revolution was not just popular ferment, how ever. It was also the
attempt at reconstructing central authority upon new institutional founda
tions. H ow did the legislators envisage the new order in the countryside?
How did they cope, not only with their own sense o f what was desirable,
but with the waves o f rural turbulence? In light o f the variety o f peasant
targets, how did the seigneurial rights com e to assume such a central role
in the legislators’ conception o f a break with the past?- From the beginning
o f their debates, these rights w ere placed within a discussion o f “ the feudal
regim e,” to be done away with. But what was this “ feudal” regim e and why
was it central to their vision o f France’s past and future?
I shall show in this book how revolutionary legislators and revolutionary
peasants confronted one another, posed problem s for one another, and
implicitly negotiated with one another. To explore the desires o f both
peasants and elites toward the beginning o f the crisis as well as the ensuing
interplay o f rural insurrection and legislative actions, I explore several sorts
o f evidence. First o f all, the expression o f the view s o f rural communities,
nobles, and urban notables as the Old Regime broke down: here I draw upon
a series o f studies o f the grievance lists o f 1789 that I have been engaged in
with Gilbert Shapiro.11 A s the Old Regime disintegrated about them that
11. Gflbert Shapiro andJohn Markoff, RevolutionaryDemands: A ContentAnalysis ofthe Cahiers

de Doléances of 1789 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997); John Markoff, “Governmental
Bureaucratization: General Processes and anAnomalous Case,” Comparative Studies in Society and
History 17 (1975): 479-503; “Some Effects oí Literacy in Eighteenth-Century France,” Journal of
Interdisciplinary History 17 (1986): 311-33; “Allies and Opponents: Nobility and Third Estate in the
Spring of 1789,” American Sociological Review 53 (1988): 477-96; "Images du roi au début de la
Révolution,” in Michel VbveOe, ed., L'image de la Révolutionfrançaise: Communications présenteés
lors du Congrès Mondialpour le Bicentenaire de la Révolution (Paris: Pergamon, 1989), 1:237—45;
“Peasants Protest- The Claims of Lord, Church and State in the Cahiers de Doléances oí 1789,”
Comparative Studies in Society and History 32 (1990): 413-54; “Peasant Grievances and Peasant
Insurrection: France in 1789,” Journal of Modem History 62 (1990): 445-76; “Prélèvements
seigneuriaux et prélèvements fiscaux: Sur l’utilisation des cahiers de doléances,” in Mélanges de
Œcole Française de Rome 103 (1991): 47-68; Gilbert Shapiro and Phillip Dawson, “Social Mobility
and Political Radicalism: The Case of the French Revolution of 1789," in William0. Aydelotte, Alan
G. Bogue, and Robert Fogel, eds., The Dimensions of Quantitative Research in History (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1972), 159-92; Gilbert Shapiro, John Markoff, and Sasha R. Weitman,
“Quantitative Studies of the French Revolution,” History and Theory: Studies m the Philosophy of
History 12 (1973): 163-91; John Markoff, Gilbert Shapiro, and Sasha R. Weitman, “Toward the
spring, Frenchmen m et in tens o f thousands o f assem blies to draw up

cahiers de doléances, lists o f grievances that w ere intended to instruct and
often to control the deputies chosen in the com plex multistage elections for
the Estates-GeneraL T hese docum ents offer precious glim pses into the
thinking o f many groups, and offer a virtually unique perspective cm the
aspirations o f civil society at the onset o f a revolutionary upheaval The
cahiers are unmatched in their capacity to give us the range o f view s
expressed by social groups around the country; they are not only invaluable
as a source for the positions being staked out in France’s forty thousand
rural communities; they are an utterly unparalleled source for the study o f
peasants in revolution. There is simply no similar body o f evidence be
queathed to us by any other revolutionary upheaval. The structure o f the
convocation process, m oreover, permits com parisons among the positions
being staked out by the country people, the non-noble urban elites and the
nobility in a way that no other source allows.
It is usually only elites o f one sort or another w hose positions cm public
issues may be assessed in anything resembling a system atic fashion at the
time o f crisis. The thinking o f intellectuals, officials, upper econom ic groups,
or revolutionary leaders is often known to us through decrees, public
debates, manifestos, m em oirs, letters. Even then, there are often serious
issues: depending on our source w e might be concerned about representa
tiveness, concealment, or failures o f m em ory. When w e deal with “ the
people” how ever, our problem s o f assessing outlooks in tim es at crisis are
vastly multiplied, for they generally control few newspapers, publish few
m em oirs, and are not among the public representatives who articulate the
positions o f political parties (even those parties that claim to speak on their
behalf). T hose who study crises must often exercise considerable ingenuity
to attempt to gauge crucial attitudes from recalcitrant sources. Consider
tw o im pressive instances o f this s o r t Richard M erritt explored a developing
American identity over the four decades that preceded the Declaration o f
Independence by systematically exploring the term s used in several colonial
newspapers to denote the inhabitants o f the thirteen colonies (“ His M ajes
ty’s subjects” versus “ Am ericans," for example) or the land they dwelt in
Integration of Content Analysis and General Methodology,” 1-58, in David Heise, ed., Sociological
Methodology, 1975 (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1974); John Markoff and Gilbert Shapiro, “Consen
sus and Conflict at the Onset of Revolution: A Quantitative Study of France in 1789,” American
Journal ofSociology 91 (1985): 28-53; Gilbert Shapiro, John Markoff, and Silvio R. Duncan Baretta,
“The Selective Transmission of Historical Documents: The Case of the Parish Cahiers of 1789,**
Histoire et Measure 2 (1987): 115-72; Gilbert Shapiro and John Markoff, “L'authenticité des
cahiers," in Bulletin (fHistoire de la Révolution Française (1990-91): 17-70; Gilbert Shapiro, “Les
demandes les phis répandues dans les cahiers de doléances,” in Ifevefle, ed.. L'image de la
Révolutionfrançaise, 1:7-14.
Introduction 7
(“ British North America” versus “ the colonies in Am erica," say).12 M arc

Ferro explored the com m on threads as well as the divergences o f Russian
w orkers, peasants, and soldiers in the crisis o f 1917 through letters and
resolutions sent to party newspapers and various claimants to governmental
authority.13 Rather m ore commonly, scholars hoping for a glimpse o f
plebeian rebels scour the archives o f the police and the magistrates for
reports, depositions, and trial records. Serious difficulties with such
sources14 hardly interferes with our sense o f how precious they are for their
vital, if im perfect, glimpse o f the thinking o f people w ho are largely
inaccessible to us but w hose outlook is fundamental to an understanding o f
the societal crisis in which they w ere enm eshed.
Scholars o f the French Revolution are in the exceptionally fortunate
position o f having in their possession the cahiers o f the spring o f 1789,
which provide a magnificent and unrivaled snapshot o f the complaints and
aspirations o f those below as well as above at the beginning o f the great
revolution. To track the course o f revolutionary conflict, how ever, even a
marvelous snapshot is inadequate: I wanted a m ovie. I wanted to see what
sorts o f actions w ere engendered in regions o f France with particular
constellations o f grievances, so I initially set about constructing a little data
file o f what 1 took to be the major kinds o f insurrectionary events in the
countryside in the spring and summer o f 1789. It was now possible to
search for the roots o f distinctive form s o f rural upheaval over space.15 But
although it was now beginning to be possible to study the relationship o f
demanding and o f acting, I still did not have my m ovie. I had tw o snapshots
12. Richard L Merritt, Symbols ofAmerican Community, 1735-1775 (New Haven: Yale Univer
sity Press, 1966).
13. Marc Ferro, “The Russian Soldier in 1917: Undisciplined, Patriotic and Revolutionary,0
Slavic Review 30 (1971): 483-512; “The Aspirations of Russian Society,” in Richard Pipes, ed,
Revolutionary Russia (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1968), 143-57.
14. To what degree does newspaper content, sometimes written in England, enlighten us on
colonial readers* views—andjust who read these periodicals? How representative are the particular
periodicals chosen by Merritt? What sort of sample of workers, soldiers, and peasants wrote letters
to Isvestiia or to the Soviet—and how did editors decide which letters to publish (and with what
alterations)? Of the many letters deposited in archives or published in newspapers (itself an
apparently haphazard sample of a much larger number actually written), how representative are the
much smaller number actually analyzed by Ferro? To what degree do the concerns of the powerful
whose records we plow through distort our picture of the powerless we hope to encounter? To
what degree, for example, do administrative records overrepresent popular turbulence in and
around major administrative centers?
15. John Markoff, “The Social Geography of Rural Revolt at the Beginning of the French
Revolution,°American SociologicalReview 50 (1985): 761-81; “Contexts and Forms of Rural Revolt:
France in 1789,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 30 (1986): 253-89; “Literacy and Revolt: Some
Empirical Notes on 1789 in France,” American Journal of Sociology 92 (1986): 323-49; “Peasant
Grievances and Peasant Insurrection.0
(and o f different objects at that). The concept o f process, s o central to

understanding both the peasant m ovem ent(s) and the legislative actions,
was still not m irrored in my data. The rural upheavals had, no doubt, som e
relation to environing social, econom ic, and political structures and, no doubt
as well, som e relation with grievances; and these matters could be explored
with the tw o snapshots. But the insurrections had not only causes, but also
consequences. And one important consequence o f insurrection was the
impact on future insurrections: by demonstrating the effectiveness o f certain
tactics and the folly o f others, by inspiring countermobilization o f those
fearful o f the intentions and capacities o f the earlier rebels, by leading the
authorities to take action, whether by way o f repression or reform . And
these consequences, in turn, becam e part o f the context within which, a
w eek or a month or a year hence, the same and different rural communities
rose again (or failed to do so). What was really needed, I reasoned, was the
capacity to see the insurrections unfold over time as well as space in
a dialogue with each other as well as with the powerful o f the new
revolutionary regim e.
The second major task o f this book, then, is tracking rural insurrection
through time and space. When does the rural upheaval take on a markedly
antiseigneurial character, and where? How are antiseigneurial events related
to the multifarious form s o f peasant revolt m ore generally? What are the
specific form s and targets o f actions against the rights o f the lords? To this
end I explore a second data set, a body o f information on som e 4,700
incidents o f rural disruption that took place betw een the summer o f 1788
and the summer o f 1793, covering roughly the period from the political
crisis that produced the decision to convoke an Estates-General up to the
Convention’s passage o f major pieces o f legislation on rural issues, am ong
them the termination o f seigneurial rights.
A s for the legislative side o f the peasant-legislator dialogue that began in
the summer o f 1789, the task is easier; this particular field happily has been
carefully tilled by many very able scholars. Although that legislative history
is broadly familiar,16 to examine it anew with an eye on the waves o f peasant
insurrection, on the shifts o f timing, targets, and tactics o f rebellious country
people, suggests new insights into the legislative half o f that dialogue.
l l i e focus on the national pattern o f rural insurrection as one side o f a
dialogue— itself set against a background o f a national survey o f positions—
inevitably com mits one to statistical argum ent It will be important to ask
16. Henri Donioi, La Révolutionfrançaise et laféodalité (Paris: Gudlaumin, 1876); Ende Chénon,
Les démembrements de la propriété foncière en France avant et après la Révolution (Paris: Recueil
Sirey, 1923); Philippe Sagnac, La législation civile de la Révolution française ((Paris: Hachette,
1898); Alphonse Aulard, La Révolution française et le régime féodal (Paris: Alcan, 1919); Marcel
Garaud, La Révolution et la propriété foncière (Paris: Recueil Sirey. 1958); Peter M. Jones, The
Peasantry m theFrench Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988).
Introduction 9
which aspects o f the seigneurial regim e are m ore important to the peasants
and which to the urban notables; to ask at which tim es and at which places
was the seigneurial regim e a significant target o f peasant action; to ask
whether the pattern o f grievances expressed in the spring o f 1789 by
rural communities, urban notables, and nobles helps us understand actions
subsequently undertaken in the countryside and legislature; and to ask what
impact, if any, the nature and timing o f those actions taken by peasants or
legislators had on the actions o f the other. In such matters 1 favor actual
counts o f various events, whether the expression o f particular sorts o f
grievances or the carrying out o f particular form s o f collective action, rather
than the exclusive reliance on quasi-quantitative statistical claims conveyed
primarily by term s like “few ” or “ many” and the like: hence the large
number o f tables, graphs, and maps. This has the consequence that a
reader’s own sense o f what “few ,” “m any,” “ large,” or “ small” might mean
in a particular context can readily be checked against the evidence.
A narrative w hose actors are usually collectivities— rural gatherings, for
example, or legislative com m ittees— and w hose actions are largely pre
sented as counts o f one sort or another has an impersonal quality. Is this a
distortion o f the participants’ experience? T here was an impersonal aspect
to the interchanges o f villages and lawgivers. To a large extent those in the
revolutionary assem blies experienced an abstract world o f “ sedition” and
“insurrection” populated by sketchily and abstractly conceived “ brigands” or
“ the people.” And for sharecroppers in Périgord, rural w eavers in Nor
mandy, smallholders in Maine, serfs around Amont, wage laborers in
Flanders, the lawgivers w ere equally rem ote. But there is a less impersonal
set o f encounters as well and precious are the docum ents that reveal them,
usually in flashes: the noble deputy Ferrières’ letters hom e to his wife, full
of anxious advice on how to avoid an attack on their home (and what to do,
should that happen) or the country priest’s Barbotin’s sudden and permanent
shift toward the political right, in his letters to a clerical colleague, on
discovering the tenacity o f peasant hostility to the tithe. (From this point o f
view, the report o f tw o agents o f the National Assem bly on their travels in
an insurgent zone stands alone.)
An appraisal o f the seigneurial regim e as a subject o f complaint as the Old
Regime fell apart and as a target o f insurrection and object o f legislation into
the 1790s bears on many important assessm ents and debates about the
nature o f the French Revolution. G eorges Lefebvre17 saw the peasant revolt
as a defensive reaction o f peasant communities confronted by increasingly
17. Georges Lefebvre, “La Révolution française et les paysans,” in his Etudes sur la Révolution
française (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1963), 343, 350-53; and Les Paysans du Nord
pendant la Révolutionfrançaise (Paris: Armand Colin, 1972), 148. The theme of the lords’ tightening
the screws is also stressed in "La Révolution française dans l’histoire du monde” in Etudes sur la
Révolutionfrançaise, 438.
demanding lords who w ere them selves increasingly inclined to participate in

a developing rural capitalism. Alexis de Tocqueville,18 in contrast, directed
us away from the level o f burden as such to the increasing sense o f that
burden as unjust, as the genuine services once provided by the lord
atrophied. Radier than seeing the marketplace as the external context that
encroached on local social relations, Tocqueville maintained it was the
increasingly demanding central state that eroded the (Mice genuine social
functions o f the tords. G eorge Taylor19 supported neither view: he urged us
to see agrarian radicalism as minimal; he denied, in consequence, that the
countryside made much o f a contribution to the radicalism o f the Revolution.
For Taylor, to the extent that any group can be said to be the bearer o f a
radical m essage, it was the urban elites— even when the matter at hand was
a rural issue. Taylor's thesis is a major challenge to the view urged by
Albert Soboul20 who, incarnating the Marxism that non-M arxists m ost love
to attack, insisted that one see a bourgeois-peasant alliance against the
bulwarks o f feudalism. For Soboul it was the joint peasant and bourgeois
action that gave the French Revolution its unique character. Alfred Cobban
challenged this portrait with a denial o f any bourgeois radicalism at all, at
least insofar as the seigneurial regim e was concerned, thereby undermining
the notion o f a bourgeois-peasant alliance against feudalism.21 This was
almost the inverse o f G eorge Taylor's critique which saw little but bourgeois
radicalism in the Revolution’s m oves against the lords; Taylor’s peasants
have nothing in the way o f revolutionary consciousness at all. M ore recently,
Hilton Root22 has argued that peasant insurrections against the lords have
been much exaggerated by all concerned and that, m oreover, such insurrec
tionary activity as did take place was o f little concern to revolutionary
governm ents.
In a very different vein, w e have all the many issues that have swirled
around the notion o f '"feudalism.” During the Revolution, the seigneurial
rights w ere invariably discussed in the context o f “ the feudal regim e" and
questions o f what, if anything, that phrase meant and what relationship, if
any, the Revolution had to that feudal regim e have been among the central
big questions, at least until the very recent shift by historians away from
18. Tocqueville, OldRegimeandRevolution.

19. George V. Taylor, “Revolutionary and Nonrevolutionary Content in the Cahiers de Doléances
of 1789: An Interim Report,” French HistoricalStudies 7 (1972): 479-502.
20. Soboul, TheFrench Revolution.
21. Alfred Cobban, The Social Interpretation of the French Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1965).
22. Hilton Root, “The Case Against George Lefebvre’s Peasant Revolution," History Workshop
28 (1989): 88-102; see also Peter M. Jones, “A Reply to Hilton Root,” History Workshop28 (1989):
103-6 and “Root’s Response to Jones,” History Workshop 28 (1989): 103-10.
Introduction 11
econom ic relationships and toward placing revolutionary discourse at the

center o f things.23
Thus, peasant risings against their lords have been held to be one o f the
engines o f. the entire revolutionary upheaval and trivial to the point o f
nonexistence. Peasants are held to have been the allies o f a revolutionary
elite, to have pushed that elite w here it did not want to go and to have been
an apathetic and conservative force only galvanized by that elite. Peasant
risings have been explained by the developm ent o f the market, the growth
o f the state, the harvest disasters o f the late 1780s, the sudden jump in
consciousness and opportunity produced by the convocation o f the Estates-
General and the long-term impact o f literacy. And very different notions o f
the m icrostructures o f motivation are deployed to connect one or m ore o f
these surrounding circum stances to disruptive rural politics: peasant vio
lence is seen as a strategy adopted in a struggle over material resources, as
an expression o f the angry resentm ent associated with a sense o f injustice,
or as a sign o f continued participation in a traditional culture as yet
unconquered by the civilizing process described by Norbert Elias.
I shall show that both peasants and legislators undertook major initiatives
but that the central impetus for rural social transformation cam e from how
each reacted to the other; that their com m on m ovem ent against the
seigneurial regim e was not present at the onset o f the Revolution in m ore
than em bryonic form ; that the antiseigneurial forces o f rural mobilization
developed in the course o f the Revolution as legislative action presented
opportunities to the countryside; and— a m ore widely appreciated matter—
that the legislative dismantling o f seigneurialism is, in substantial part, an
adaptation to peasant insurrection. A s for the new and still current scholarly
stress on discourse, the conception o f the feudal regim e was an important
building-block o f that discourse, but rather than examine an intellectual
construction in splendid isolation, w e need to reinsert it into the turbulent,
confusing, and conflicting demands that revolutionary legislators confronted
every day, even as, in explaining and defending their actions, they elaborated
upon their notions o f the feudal.
The tactic o f investigation throughout will be systematically comparative.
In exploring the them e o f seigneurial rights in the cahiers, w e shall com pare
the cahiers o f peasants, elite town-dwellers, and nobles. We shall search
among the seigneurial rights for the ways these groups distinguish one
seigneurial right from another; to check our understandings w e shall then
23. On recent trends in revolutionary historiography, see Jack Censer, “The French Revolution
After l\vo Hundred fears,” inJoseph Kbits and Michael Haltzel, eds., The Global Ramifications of
the French Revolution (Washington, D.C.: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 1994), 7-25; and Sara
Maza, "Politics, Culture and the Origins of the French Revolution,” Journal of Modem History 61
(1989): 704-23.
explore the com parison o f grievances about one tax with another. We shall
also try to understand what is special about seigneurial rights by seeing
how, in the aggregate, grievances about seigneurial rights differ from
grievances about other matters. We hope to arrive at a sense not m erely o f
the distinctive characteristics o f antiseigneurial grievances but bow they
fitted with other grievances into an overarching whole. We shall pursue the
same strategy o f system atic comparison when w e turn to insurrection: not
just where and when did insurrection occur, but how (and with hick, why)
did the spatial and temporal patterns o f antiseigneurial events differ from
those o f other form s o f rural insurrection? Am ong antiseigneurial actions,
w here and when w ere the lord’s docum ents seized, his fences tom down,
or his château invaded? And how did seigneurial rights fit into a larger,
overarching whole; namely, the ebb and flow o f rural rebellion? When,
finally, w e turn to legislation, w e shall ask how the trajectory o f legislation
(xi seigneurial rights resem bles— and yet is distinct from— legislation on
other concerns o f insurrectionary peasants; and w e shall also ask how the
legislative program on seigneurial rights took its place alongside other
arenas o f legislation to form yet another overarching whole. In all areas w e
search for points o f distinction but also for encom passing larger patterns.
We shall see in the earlier chapters o f this book that the grievances o f
France’s villagers w ere very much focused on their burdens. The claims
upon them o f lord, church, and state, how ever, w ere experienced quite
differently. Although nothing else in French life occasioned so many com
plaints in the countryside as did taxation, there was a very strong propensity
to demand an im proved tax system . Demands about the seigneurial regim e,
in contrast, w ere in large part demands that the lord’s claims be done
away with. But even the seigneurial rights w ere not seen simply as an
undifferentiated and hated ensem ble; France’s country people distinguished
one right from another, and significant minorities held som e aspects o f the
seigneurial regim e worthy o f reform ; in particular, those attached to services
valued in the rural community.
When, in the book’s middle chapters, w e look at the pattern o f peasant
insurrection, w e clearly see that this collection o f grievances was not
instantly translated into antiseigneurial action. The major target o f peasant
revolt in the major risings o f the seventeenth century had been royal
taxation. Antitax actions continued to be a significant part o f the rural
protest repertoire in the m ore generally peaceful eighteenth century but
w ere now joined by major waves o f actions over questions o f food supply.
Toward the end o f die Old Regime, there appears to have been an increasing
tendency to go after seigneurial targets, but conflict over food or taxes
continued to be far m ore com mon down to the eve o f the Revolution.
The evidence that w e shall examine will show that, initially, subsistence
questions are what occasioned collective action as the Old Regime began to
Introduction 13
break down. Betw een the summer o f 1788 and the spring o f 1789, how ever,
antiseigneurial actions w ere on the rise and grew still stronger in the
dramatic summer. By the fall o f 1789, the seigneurial regim e had becom e
the target o f choice o f insurrectionary peasants, and remained so for the
next three years, although at som e moments and in som e places other
targets w ere attractive as weH So what needs to be explained is not just
how the structures o f French society form ed an antiseigneurial peasantry,
but how peasants with a variety o f grievances cam e to turn to antiseigneurial
struggle in the course o f revolution and to make antiseigneurial actions the
dominant as well as m ost distinctive form o f insurrection o f the entire
period 1788-93.
Let m e stress that they turned to antiseigneurial actions. Claims that
antiseigneuriahsm was a response to the enduring structures o f French
history will be hard put to explain a process occurring over a period o f
months. We need to look for a revolutionary process, not a revolutionary
reflex. When w e examine the geography o f revolt, w e shall see that w e
need to take both space and time into account At (Hie or another moment,
different regions w ere at the cutting edge o f antiseigneurial challenge.
Provence was in the forefront at an early m om ent the summer o f 1789 saw
the northern countryside (Hi center stage; beyond that summer the battle
against the lords was carried forward, at different m om ents, in eastern
Brittany, in the Southeast and in the Southwest (while various northern
zones focused on subsistence, on conflicts over land, m ore rarely on w ages,
and at tim es feD silent). We shall see that explanations in term s o f the impact
o f the market and the state make sense o f our data, to som e ex ten t but do
not get to the heart o f the Revolution as process.
In the later chapters, w e look at the Revolution and the role o f the
countryside within it from the vantage point o f the legislators. In staking out
positions in the spring o f 1789, the assem blies around the country that
elected Third Estate deputies to the Estates-General gave their deputies
docum ents w hose position on the seigneurial regim e tended to be distinctive
in a number o f ways, including the strength o f their support for indemnifying
the lords whose seigneurial rights w ere to be ended. The nobles’ deputies
brought docum ents that did not g o that far; indeed they often avoided taking
up the seigneurial rights at all or, som etim es, in taking them up, opted to
maintain them. Yet it was the delegates o f these assem blies that in August
1789 proclaimed the abolition o f “ the feudal regim e in its entirety.” In
practice, subsequent legislation made clear that “abolition” was often to
involve indemnification. Peasant insurrection resum ed and the National
Assem bly and its successors continued to grope for a formula to pacify the
countryside, ultimately finding it in abandoning the initial plan.
So peasants cam e to focus on seigneurial rights as their major target and
legislators cam e to m ove to a far m ore radical notion o f what to do about the
14 THE ABOUTION OF FEUDALISM
seigneurial regim e than is evident in the cahiers o f the spring o f 1789, in the
early rural insurrections and in the initial legislation. T here was, I shall
argue, a dialogic process that led, not to a com prom ise, hut to a mutual
radicalization. The form “ abolition” was to take was altered by revolutionary
peasants and revolutionary legislators in their angry, violent, frustrating,
antagonistic (but som etim es cooperative) dialogue. But what was “ feudal
ism” ? This m aster concept itself was being imbued with new significance.
But the discourse o f feudalism did not evolve in a world made up o f nothing
but w ords. The legislators deployed it as they grappled, at various times
and in various ways, with sharecroppers, smallholders, forest w orkers,
w eavers, renters, and serfs willing to challenge the lords’ claims upon them
openly, collectively, and aggressively. The legislators groped for a narrow
definition that would square with the claim that they had already abolished
feudalism (and need do no m ore in the future). But they also claimed that
abolition to be so profound as to explain the fearful enmity o f other European
states; and they threatened those states with a similar overthrow o f their
own feudal regim es in the event o f war. Som e in the legislature thought that
the definition and deploym ent o f w ords could control the flow o f events; but
they uttered those w ords in response to the thousands o f rural mobilizations
w hose ebb and flow w e shall explore.
Lynn Hunt24 has suggested that much writing on the Revolution is focused
on causes and consequences in a way that leaves the revolutionary events
them selves as a blank. The developm ent o f national and international
markets, w e are som etim es told, created an energetic and prosperous class
looking to further opportunities for econom ic change; a peasantry in part
buying into the new possibilities o f prosperity and in part resentful o f the
new possibilities o f impoverishment; and a nobility in part won over to and
eagerly participating in the new order and in part attempting to halt the
march o f change. This is social dynamite; and when the dust o f the social
explosion cleared, w e have the bourgeois France o f the nineteenth century.
A rather different story focuses on the state, rather than the m arket The
rationalizing propensities o f a growing state undermines the pretensions o f
local institutions to wield authority, o f the traditionally privileged to have
their advantages tolerated and o f the very claims o f hallowed tradition as a
justification o f social arrangements. Peasants com e to experience their lords
as thieves rather than honored patrons; educated and w ell-off com m oners
see legally defined hierarchy as an unjust refuge for incom petence and a
barrier to progress; and even som e among the privileged them selves no
longer believe their own privilege is justified and hope to find a renew ed
sense o f their own worth in joining in the struggle for an enlightened future.
24. Lynn A. Hunt, Mides, Culture and Class m the French Revolution (Berkeley and Los
Angeles: University of California Press, 1984), 1-16.
Introduction 15
This, too, is social dynam ite, and when the dust clears, w e have the m odem
French state presiding over a society o f individuals, the old corporate and
hierarchical structures consigned to history’s dustbin.
In either o f these stories, Lynn Hunt suggests, w e are led away from
what happens in the Revolution itself: w e m ove from the seeds o f the new
order germ inating in the Old Regim e to its bearing fruit in the m odem w orld.
C auses lie in the decades or even centuries that precede and consequences
in the tw o centuries that follow . The point o f her com m ent is to try to get
us to look anew at the possibility that som ething was created in the
Revolution itself. I shall be arguing here that accounts o f long-term struc
tures do help us understand patterns o f grievance-m aking, patterns o f rural
insurrection and revolutionary legislation. Both accounts o f how interests
w ere shaped by econom ic changes (which I shall call, approxim ately,
M arxian) and o f cultural changes that accom panied the grow th o f a rationaliz
ing state (w hich I shall call, approxim ately, Tocquevillean) help make sense
o f a good deal o f the data I shall p resen t But what they do not explain is
critical: they do not explain the shift in peasant targets and the radicahzation
o f legislation. Som ething happened in the Revolution (Lynn Hunt’s point).
W hat happened, or so I shall argue, is that villagers and legislators dealt
w ith each other and altered their actions; the convergence o f their actions
w as what ended the seigneurial regim e.
W hatever contribution this book m akes to understanding one revolution,
it is not prim arily in any novelty o f facts w rested from archival docum ents.
But counting grievances or insurrections o f one sort or another d oes reveal
unseen patterns and confirm s som e familiar claim s (but refu tes oth ers). This
book proposes to sift through the spatial and tem poral patterns o f grievance
and o f insurrection, in order to assay established theories and try to develop
new on es. It aims to break new ground by charting the relationship o f
grievance and revolt. M ost fundamentally, in exploring the dialogue o f
insurrectionary peasants and revolutionary legislators, it sheds, I believe, a
revealing light on both.
C h apter
2
S e ig n e u r ia l R ig h t s on th e
R e v o l u t io n a r y A g e n d a
For all the attention the rural insurrections o f 1789 have received, there is
still a great deal to learn. Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie has suggested that the
revolts provide us with a window into a great transform ation o f the French
countryside. He is struck by the contrast with the great seventeenth-
century m ovem ents o f violent resistance to the fiscal pressures o f the
grow ing state. A fter a long interval in which the defeated peasantry raised
no m ajor challenge, the distinctive target o f the rural upheavals o f the early
Revolution had sw itched from the claim s o f the state to those o f the lord.
U nderstanding this shift, Le Roy Ladurie contends, should illuminate the
rural history o f France in m odem tim es. Behind the change in peasant
actions m ust lie m ajor changes in French institutions.1
We can try to understand what had made the dem ands o f their lords so
central a focu s o f the revolutionary m obilization o f the French countryside
1. Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, “Révoltes et contestations rurales en Prance de 1675 à 1788,“

Amoks: Economies, Sociétés, Civilisations 29 (1974): 6-22.
S eigneurial R ights on the R evolutionary Agenda 17
through an exploration o f the rural grievances expressed at the Revolution’s

on se t T h ose grievances reveal a great deal and through those grievances
w e will be able to see som ething o f the larger social contexts that the people
o f the countryside w ere addressing. But w e shall also see that the role
played by the seigneurial rights is m ore than the inexorable w orking-out o f
forces clearly in play at the beginning o f the great upheaval The long-term
p rocesses that Le Roy Ladurie asks us to study are essential to understand
ing the attack on the rights o f the lords; but w e shall see that w e need as
w ell to consider the Revolution itself as a p rocess in which the countryside
and the legislature confronted one another and in this confrontation nurtured
the insurrections and the legislation that brought the tim e o f the lords to
an end.
W hy d o peasants rise against one target rather than another? To date
there is little scholarly consensus on the causes and significance o f the rural
insurrection. In one view there is a direct connection betw een the burden
o f claim s chi peasant resou rces and the vehem ence o f defensive peasant
action. G eorges L efebvre2 stresses the w eight o f taxes, tithes, and sei
gneurial rights. In accounting for the revolt, he asserts that seigneurial
rights w ere increasingly heavy and that taxes probably w ere. The burning
o f the châteaux is central to his summary account o f the risings, w hile tax
disturbances are clearly secondary. The im plicit yet clear explanation rests
on his reading o f the cahiers: “ The petitions call attention to the crushing
w eight o f all these dues taken together, finding it heavier than the parallel
burden o f the royal taxes.’’3 The rural m ovem ent was a significant pressure
on revolutionary legislators: w ithout it, it is unlikely that the new regim e
would have so profoundly attacked the seigneurial rights.4 L efebvre’s m ore
m icroscopic treatm ents also stress the w eight o f exactions. A t one point in
his m inute account o f the claim s upon the peasants o f the N ord, for exam ple,
he w rites: “ T he feudal rights made up a heavy w eight, often irritating but
above all custom ary. If they so strongly excited the anim osity o f the
peasants at the end o f the Old Regim e, wasn’t this because the lords insisted
upon them with m ore exactitude and rigor or w ere even increasing them ?” 5
H e briefly considers the possibility o f a change in peasant attitudes as an
autonom ous elem ent: “ It may be that they judged intolerable what their
2. Georges Lefebvre, The Coming of the French Revolution (Princeton; Princeton University
Press, 1947), 131-51.
3. Ibid., 141.
4. Georges Lefebvre, “La Révolution française et les paysans,” in h» Etudes sur la Révolution
française (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1963), 343.
& Lefebvre, Lespaysans duNordpendant la Révolutionfrançaise (Paris: Presses Universitaires
de France, 1972), 148. The theme of the lords tightening the screws is also stressed in “La
Révolution française et les paysans,” 350-53.
fathers had supported.”6 But he returns quickly to the them e o f a seigneurial

crackdow n. Explaining regional variations in the pattern o f revolt, he points
to differences in the w eight o f the seigneurial rights: One zone has few er
lords and many possible rights w ere nonexistent; a second has a full panoply
o f rights rigorously enforced. The form er zone is relatively prosperous; the
latter, poorer, finds the greater w eight all the harder to support. H ence it is
in the latter, w here rights w ere heavier and peasant resou rces lighter, that
(Hie finds the risings o f the sum m er o f 1789.7
Elem ents o f this picture are shared by many. T he m uch-debated notion
o f a “feudal reaction” according to which the lords w ere pushing to extract
m ore tow ard the end, w ould, if accepted, constitute strong evidence that an
increase in the burden was central to the rising.8 A less com m on tactic, but
also concordant with L efebvre’s account, has been the attem pt to show that,
increasing or not, the level o f seigneurial exactions was frequently high.9
B y contrast, Tocqueville urges us to look not to the sheer level o f
burden, but to the collapse o f services provided by the lords, services that
constituted justifications for paym ents.10 To the extent that local lords
protected the com m unity, repaired and policed the roads, resolved com m u
nal disputes, supported the true Church, inspected w eights and m easures,
and provided grain in hard tim es the paym ents to the lords supported vital
services. A s these functions w ere seized by the developing state, how ever,
the lord’s pow ers and prerogatives, though in som e ways dim inished, w ere
experienced as unjust and detested. It was not the w eight o f the seigneurial
system that led peasants to rise in anger, but its loss o f utility. For
Tocqueville the issue is not burden as such at all, but ju stice. A heavy
burden that purchases a genuine service, a lord w hose revenues are
com pensations for his filling a communal need are tolerated, but even a
lightened burden that purchases nothing is not to be borne. In com parative
6. Lefebvre, Paysans duNord, 149.

7. Ibid.. 162-63.
8. Various views within an enormous literature may be sampled in Wiliam Doyle, “Was There
an Aristocratic Reaction in Pre-Revohitionary France?” in DouglasJohnson, ed., French Society and
Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), 3-28; Guy Lemarchand, “La féodalité
et la Révolution française: Seigneurie et communauté paysanne (1780-1799)," Annales historiques
de la Révolution française 242 (1980): 536-58; Jonathan Dewald, ftmt-SL-Pierre, 1396-1789:
Lordship, Community and Capitalism (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press,
1987), 232.
9. For example, Guy Lemarchand, “Le féodalisme dans la France rurale des temps modernes:
essai de caractérisation," Annales historiques de la Révolution française 41 (1969): 77-108. Henri
Sée regards it as reasonable supposition that where complaints about taxes outran complaints about
seigneurial rights, the tax burden was probably heavier than the seigneuriaL See Henri Sée, “La
rédaction et la valeur historique des cahiers de paroisses pour les états-généraux de 1789,” Revue
Historique, no. 103 (1910): 305-6.
10. Alexis de Tocqueville, The Old Regime and the French Revolution (Garden City, N.Y.:
Doubieday, 1955).
perspective Tocqueville suggests w e note how , heavy as the dem ands o f

lord and church might be, they w ere less heavy than elsew here in Europe.
T he relative lightness is a sign o f decay, and it is the decay o f a genuine
public role for the lord that m ade his .decreased exactions into intolerable
th e ft11 This position, too, has its recen t adherents. William Brustein and
H udson M eadwell have recently tried to marshal evidence to dem onstrate
that w here the lord’s authority was coupled with the control o f resou rces
adequate for the perform ance o f a genuine public role, the lords w ere not a
principal target o f peasant action .12
W here L efebvre tends to explain peasant risings by a heavy and rising
burden, then, Tocqueville points to the decline o f services. Both, how ever,
con verge on what is to be explained; nam ely, an intense rural hostility to
the seigneurial regim e that made the peasantry a form idable force w hose
pressures on the new revolutionary governm ent significantly contributed to
an overall radicalization. M ore recently, a third judgm ent on the peasants’
revolution has em erged. In an influential article on the grievance lists o f
1789— the cahiers de doléances13— G eorge Taylor contended that those
docum ents show a France far less ready for social revolution than a
reader o f Tocqueville would e x p e ct The parish cahiers in particular show a
narrow ness o f vision and a lack o f concern with national political questions.
Even on the issue o f seigneurial rights, it w as upper urban groups w ho w ere
the carriers o f radicalism . On his reading o f the evidence, Taylor is quite
skeptical o f claim s that the peasants radicalized the revolution; he specifically
dism isses A lfred Cobban’s attem pt to show that it was the militant country
side and not a rather conservative group o f revolutionary legislators that
drove the revolution forw ard.14
W hat no party to this debate has done is to exam ine peasant attitudes
tow ard their various burdens in detail, right by right and tax by tax. Such a
procedure, o f cou rse, sheds no light on the objective level o f burdens borne
11. Ibid.. 22-31.

12. WübamBrustein, “Regional Social Orders in France and the French Revolution," Comparative
Social Research 9 (1986): 145-61; Hudson Meadwell, “Exchange Relations Between Lords and
Peasants," Archives Europienes de Sociologie 28 (1987): 3—49. A more or less TocqueviUean
perspective on lord-peasant relations is now common in comparative studies of rural insurrection.
James Scott and Samuel Popkin, who disagree on much, are in accord that rebellious peasant action
is oriented not to what dominant strata take from them, but to the balance of what is taken and
what is given. See James C. Scott, The Moral Economy of the Peasant: Rebellion andSubsistence in
SoutheastAsia (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976) and Samuel Popkin, TheRationalPeasant
(Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1979).
13. George V. Taylor, “Revolutionary andNonrevolutionary Content in the Cahiers de Doléances
of 1789: An Interim Report," French HistoricalStudies 7 (1972): 479-502.
14. The Cobban position disputed by Taylor was itself developed as part of a critique of Marxist
dams of bourgeois antipathyto the lords. See Alfred Cobban, TheSocialInterpretation oftheFrench
Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1965).
(let alone services received ). It does, how ever, perm it us to exam ine alm ost
m icroscopically how the people o f the countryside conceived o f what w as
dem anded o f them and o f those w ho dem anded it I shall show in this
chapter and Chapter 3 that French villagers engaged in a m ultifaceted
evaluation o f their burdens, making at tim es rather fine judgm ents about the
tolerable and the intolerable. Their burdens w ere central to their w ishes, as
L efebvre indicates, but their evaluation o f these burdens raised issu es o f
utility and fairness in w ays broadly consonant with T ocqueville's picture. In
considering the paym ents to the lord, the church, or the state, the French
countryside was animated by considerations o f services received , o f equity,
and even o f som ething verging on a sense o f potential citizenship not often
ascribed to village France. I shall reaffirm Taylor’s view that the broad
political issues found in the cahiers o f higher-status groups preoccupy the
peasants very little, but I shall also show the peasants to be anim ated by
their ow n broad concerns and to be, in som e regards, m ore radical than
those elites.
T he parish cahiers show that France’s villages w ere settings for consider
able thought about the French institutions that im pinged upon them , m ore
thought than is always recognized. A bel Poitrineau w rites o f the peasants o f
Auvergne w hose poverty and illiteracy “make them unused to and perhaps
incapable o f linking their spontaneous protest to a coherent body o f general
ideas on social or political organization."15 And William D oyle explains the
failure o f their cahiers to condem n “ feudalism as a w hole” : “ Such an idea
w as beyond the intellectual grasp o f illiterate or sem i-literate p easan ts."161
believe, on the contrary, the evidence d oes show the capacity o f the
peasants to distinguish one seigneurial right from another, one tax from
another, one church exaction from another dem onstrates a considerable
intellectual grasp o f their w orld.17
The Cahiers de Doléances

We shall explore the discussions o f seigneurial rights in the cahiers de
doléances, the rem arkable collection o f political docum ents produced in the
cou rse o f the convocation o f the E states-G eneral o f 1789. Financial crisis
forced the governm ent to convene this body, by m eans o f w hich H is
15. Abel Fointrineau, “Le détonateur économico-fiscal des rancoeurs catégorielles profondes,
lors des explosions de la colère populaire en Auvergne, au XVIIIe siècle,” in Jean Nicholas, ed..
Mouvementspopulaires et conscience sociale, XVIe-XIXe siècles, (Paris: Maloine, 1985), 361.
16. WilliamDoyle, Origins ofOteFrenchRevolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), 198.
17. We shall examine in Chapter 9 the intellectual constructions of those who did speak of the
feudal regime as a whole.
M ajesty’s subjects, through their representatives, conveyed their view s to

the throne. No such body had m et since 1614, as kings sought to assert
their independence o f all m erely human institutions. W hen the m onarchy
acceded to the resuscitation o f the E states-G eneral it sought to enhance its
legitim acy while denying obstreperous elite forces a platform to pursue their
program o f restricting royal authority. Although the tradition o f separate
election s o f delegates from the three estates o f the realm— the clergy,
nobility, and Third Estate— was maintained, the electoral p rocess allow ed a
w ide suffrage and saw the representation, to one degree or another, o f
virtually the entire kingdom and m ost o f the significant social groupings
o f the O ld R egim e.18 The m ix o f traditionally hierarchical and corporate
conceptions and m ore individualistic and egalitarian ones that is visible in
fusing a w ide suffrage with three distinct orders perm eated the entire
electoral p rocess.19
The electoral district used for the previous E states-G eneral, in 1614, had
been the bailliage, a judicial unit defining the territorial jurisdiction o f a
low er-level royal cou rt It was adopted, with m odifications here and there,
as the basis o f the elections o f 1789. The E states-G eneral was a gathering
o f delegates from the three estates o f the realm . A s had been done in the
past, each estate— clergy, nobility, and Third E state (a residual category
that included m ost o f the population)— follow ed its ow n electoral procedure.
T he rules defining eligibility w ere different for each estate, but gave m ost
adult m en an opportunity to attend an assem bly.20 W hile the convocation
varied a great deal from region to region, there w as a basic regulation and a
m odal procedure. Although the clergy’s elections acknow ledged ecclesiasti
cal hierarchy in the selection o f the chair o f the bailliage m eeting, the parish
clergy w ere num erically dom inant A s for the Second E state, fief-holding
nobles w ere honored by a personal letter o f convocation (w hile other nobles
w ere invited w ily by a collective notice), but virtually all noblem en could
show up and vote. In the case o f the num erous Third E state, a sim ilarly
broad suffrage obviously required a sequence o f indirect election s. Each
bailliage contained tow ns and rural parishes. Within each o f the rural
parishes a m eeting o f all the eligible m em bers o f the Third E state w as held,
to elect delegates to a bailliage assem bly. D ecisions w ere m ade by public
18. Standard sources on the convocation are Armand Brette, Receuü de documents relatifs à la
convocation des états généraux de 1789 (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1894-1915) and Beatrice Fry
Hyslop, A Guide to the General Cahiers of 1789, with the Texts of Unedited Cahiers (New York:
Octagon, 1968).
19. For a detailed analysis of the convocation rules, see Gilbert Shapiro and John Markoff,
Revolutionary Demands: A ContentAnalysis ofthe Cahiers deDoléances of1789 (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 1997), chap. 7.
20. The formal rules excluded most women and some poor men but even those women who
were efigibie tended to stay away, and something similar may be said of the poor in many places.
voice vote. In the tow ns there w as a sim ilar m eeting o f each guild or
corporation, as well as a m eeting o f those not organized into corporate
bodies. T h ese m eetings elected deputies to a tow n m eeting, which in turn
elected representatives to the bailliage assem bly, w here they m et with the
rural delegates. Som etim es this bailliage assem bly elected delegates to the
E states-G eneral at Versailles. In other cases there m ight be still another
step in which delegates from several bailliages m et together to ch oose
representatives. E very one o f these assem blies— parish, guild, tow n, bailli
age, or group o f several bailliages— w as a deliberative as w ell as an electoral
body. That is, it not only ¡»eked representatives, but also drew up a cahier
de doléances, a record o f grievances, suggestions, com plaints, and proposals.
The assem blies o f the nobles and the clergy also drafted cahiers as w ell as
elected deputies.
What is rem arkable about the cahiers, and gives them their special
interest to students o f social change, is that the French Revolution is the
only m ajor revolution at the beginning o f which so m uch o f the nation
gathered in public assem blies and recorded its grievances, aspirations, and
dem ands for change. Since little would appear as patently significant in the
study o f a revolution as the range, intensity, and distribution o f grievances
am ong groups in the population, the cahiers de doléances are absolutely
unique in im portance as a docum entary source.
M ore than 40,000 corporate and territorial entities (craft guilds, parishes,
tow ns, bailliages, and so forth) drew up these docum ents. The cahiers w ere
to serve as m andates for the delegates elected for the national convocation
o f the E states-G eneral in the spring o f 1789. A s open-ended lists o f
grievances and proposals for reform , the cahiers are extraordinarily varied
in length, tone, range o f subjects covered, m ode o f exposition, and opinions.
A content analysis o f these docum ents provides the statistical database on
which this study will draw .21
O f the many types o f docum ents produced w e have coded three collec
tions.
1. T he general cahiers that assem blies o f the nobility endorsed (166 docu
m ents).
2. The general cahiers that assem blies o f the Third E state endorsed (198
docum ents).22 For convenience, w e shall refer to these as the "T hird
Estate cahiers. ”
3. A national sam ple o f the cahiers o f rural parishes (748 docum ents).
21. The development of this database was earned out together with Gilbert Shapiro. For a
general discussion of this research program, see Gilbert Shapiro, John Markoff, and Sasha R.
Weitman, "Quantitative Studies of the French Revolution," History and Theory 12 (1973): 163-91,
and Shapiro and Markoff, RevolutionaryDemands.
22. A "general” cahier is one drawn up at the last stage of the convocation; that is, one that was
carried to the meetings of the Estates-General in Versailles rather thananyhigher level intermediary
S eigneurial R ights on the R evolutionary A genda 23
Coding the Cahiers

To appreciate the analyses that follow , the coding o f the cahiers m ust be
briefly described.23 In the construction o f our code for the cahiers, our
objective was to translate every grievance in the docum ents into a language
that is convenient for com puter analysis, particularly since it has only one
w ay to express a particular demand. We attem pted to capture as m uch o f
the con crete m eaning (as distinguished from the analytical significance) o f
the text in its coded representation. The cod e for a given demand includes,
first o f all, a designation o f the subject o f the grievance (ordinarily an
institutional or problem area) and, second, a cod e for the action that is
dem anded in the docu m en t24 The code guide has a very large num ber o f
institutional and action cod es intended to capture all grievances that appear
in the cahiers with any significant frequency.
T he action cod es are relatively sim ple. The action may be quite precise,
such as “ reestablish,” or it may be extrem ely vauge: for exam ple, “ do
som ething about” som e su b ject O ther cod es represent such sim ple and
com m only dem anded actions as “ abolish” or “ maintain” som ething or other,
“ equalize,” “ sim plify,” or “ standardize.”
The cod e for the subject o f the grievance, its institutional or problem
area, is som ew hat m ore com plex: it is organized as a four-level hierarchy.
The first level o f the hierarchy represents m qjor institutional categories o f
eighteenth-century France:
0 M iscellaneous25
1 General
C Constitution
E Econom y
G G overnm ent
assembly. I phrase this description in a rather chunsy way since there were joint cahiers endorsed
by more than one estate, and we included them in the group of documents coded so long as the
relevant estate endorsed the grievances.
23. For a fuller treatment of the coding methods and their rationale, see John Markoff, Gilbert
Shapiro, and Sasha R. Weitman, “Toward the Integration of Content Analysis and General
Methodology,” in David Heise, ed., Sociological Methodology 1975 (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass,
1974), 1-58, as well as Shapiro and Markoff, RevolutionaryDemands.
24. We abo provide the coder the option of expressing qualifications and detailed notes clarifying
coding decisions, in the form of a Conventional and a Free Remarks field. For example, the coder
might indicate that die text b more specific than the code by writing SPEC in the conventional field
and the details in the Free Remarks field.
25. In any position of the hierarchy, or in the action field, a "0” or miscellaneous code refers to a
grievance that does not fit any of the categories provided: in the present instance, the first
hierarchical level, it would mean a grievance neither constitutional nor economic nor governmental,
nor referring to the judiciary, religion, or stratification. A “l” b very different: it refers to ageneral
grievance, which falb under most oral of the categories provided.
J Judiciary
R Religion
S Stratification System
We shall illustrate the hierarchical principle by show ing those sections o f

the code that are required to encode the demand that the gabelle (the salt
tax) be standardized; that is, that it be subject to the sam e rate and
adm inistrative rules throughout the country. The full cod e would read:
G TA IN G A ST (L e., G overnm ent, Taxation, Indirect T axes, G abelle,
Standardize). To begin with, the Level 1 category, “ G overnm ent,” is broken
down into the follow ing L evel 2 cod es:
G 0 Governm ent— M iscellaneous

G 1 G overnm ent— General
G AA Adm inistrative A gencies
G FI G overnm ent— Finances
G KI The King
G M I M ilitary
G RL Regional and Local G overnm ent
G TA G overnm ent— Taxation
“ Taxation” is divided into L evel 3 categories as follow s:
G TA 0 Governm ent— Taxation— M iscellaneous

G TA 1 Governm ent— Taxation— G eneral
G TA AD Tax Advantages
G TA DA D irect Tax A gencies
G TA DI Existing D irect Taxes
G TA IA Indirect Tax A gencies
G TA IN Existing Indirect Taxes
G TA NT New Taxes
G TA TA Tax Adm inistration
Finally, G TA IN , “ Indirect T axes,” is divided into the follow ing relatively

con crete L evel 4 coding categories representing particular taxes:
G TA IN 0 Existing Indirect Taxes— M iscellaneous

G TA IN 1 Existing Indirect Taxes— G eneral
G TA IN AI A ides
G TA IN CD Centièm e D enier
G TA IN CU Cuir
G TA IN DC D roits de C ontrôle
G TA IN DD D roits Domaniaux
S eigneurial R ights on the Revolutionary Agenda 25
G TA IN DF D roits sur la Fabrication

G TA IN DJ D roits Joints aux A ides
G TA IN ES D roits D’E ntrée e t de Sortie
G TA IN FE Fer
G TA IN GA G abelle
G TA IN HU Huiles
G TA IN IN Insinuation
G TA IN OC O ctrois des V illes
G TA IN OF Centièm e D enier des O ffices
A s w e shall see, the main advantage o f this kind o f hierarchical organiza

tion is that it facilitates analysis at m ultiple levels. W e can study, in other
w ords, the frequencies (and the consensus) o f various groups not only on
the gabelle but also on the m ore general categories o f indirect taxes or o f
taxes in general or even o f dem ands relative to government, taxes, o f cou rse
included. An assessm ent o f this study depends not only on the quality o f the
discussion o f evidence but also on the quality o f the evidence itself. I shall
introduce tw o questions h ere: (1 ), the adequacy o f the cahiers as a sou rce
for the view s o f the French people, and (2 ), the adequacy o f our sam ple o f
the cahiers. Each o f these questions requires a rather lengthy response and
is in fact dealt with fully in a book with G ilbert Shapiro, Revolutionary
Demands. I shall limit m yself here to the briefest o f assertions.26
First o f all, the cahiers need to be critically evaluated as sou rces o f
inform ation cm political grievances. M any historians have criticized them for
a w ide variety o f alleged shortcom ings as public opinion data. For exam ple,
certain individuals are supposed to have been too influential at the assem blies
(the presiding officers, for exam ple), and others (like the duke o f O rléans)
deliberately circulated “ m odel cahiers” that w ere som etim es closely im itated
by som e o f the actual cahiers. In addition there are serious questions
regarding the extent o f participation in the parish electoral p rocess.27
M oreover, it has often been argued, the collective nature o f the assem blies
m akes it difficult to know ju st w hose opinions are expressed in these
docum ents. M uch o f this criticism is m isplaced.28
26. There is abo a third significant question, namely, the adequacy of our coding. This is
discussed inRevolutionaryDemands and I will not repeat that discussion here.
27. A few high points from an enormous literature: Marc Bouloiseau, “Elections de 1789 et
communautés rurales en Haute-Normandie,” Annales Historiques de la Révolution Française 28
(1956): 29-47; Melvin Edelstein, "Vfers une ‘sociologie électorale’ de la Révolution française: La
participation des citadins et campagnards (1789-1793),” Revue &Histoire Moderne et Contemporaine
22 (1975): 508-29; Ran Halévi, “La Monarchie et les élections: position des problèmes,’’ in Keith
Michael Baker, ed., The French Revolution and Ou Creation of a Modem Political Culture, voL 1,
TheRditical Culture ofthe OldRegime (Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1987), 387—402.
28. Let us consider, for example, the charge that the cahiers reveal little about the views of
assemblies that drafted them because they contain material copied from other cahiers or from
We need to see the assem blies that adopted d ie cahiers as engaged in a

political action. T h ere are judgm ents being m ade o f what is possible to
obtain and other judgm ents o f what it is im politic to m ention. T h ere are
decisions by som e in the assem blies not to object to certain grievances
w hose inclusion is proposed by others— so long, that is, as the proposers
will not ob ject to one’s ow n pet p rojects. T here are also, no doubt, topics
best avoided because they are hopelessly divisive. T he cahiers, in short,
constitute a form o f strategic speech. If noble assem blies say little on many
seigneurial rights, w e suspect (and shall argue below ) that it is not because
they had no w ishes, as individuals, but because they frequently disagreed
am ong them selves and also because it w as an area som e w ished out o f
public debate. The dem ands expressed in cahiers are those that groups
constituted in specific w ays could manage to agree upon at a specific m om ent
and with a com plex audience in mind: at an assem bly one had not only to
com e to term s with the other nobles, urban notables, or villagers with
whom on e w as trying to agree on a text, but one had to also bear in mind
the ultim ately public nature o f the act, the E states-G eneral ahead, and on e’s
sense— possibly shared with one’s fellow s at the assem bly, possibly not— o f
what it was shrew d and what it w as prudent to demand.
A cahier, then, is a m arvelous snapshot o f the staking-out o f positions,
but it is only a snapshot. A year dow n the line, in changing circum stances,
the sam e assem blies m ight w ell have seen things differently. A year dow n
the line, those w ho had been constituted as electoral assem blies m ight
constitute them selves differently. B y M arch 1792 or M arch 1793 a portion
o f the villagers may have found a basis for acting on their ow n w hether as
consum ers o f grain, earners o f w ages, or payers o f rent; the urban notables
w ho joined in passing a text would very likely have divided into various
politicized factions (and som e would have dropped out o f politics); som e
nobles would now be in exile and others would have learned to keep q u iet
The cahiers are not a window through which w e see sa n e presodal
“ attitudes” ; they show us speech -in -con text
In a m editative essay on the dialogue o f dom ination and subordination,
propaganda designed specifically to influence them. But a comparison of the bona âde cahiers with
such electoral campaign materials reveals that choice was exercised in selecting among available
models; that frequently only a few articles were copied; that models were rarely if ever copied m
toto; that even when totally copied, new demands were usually added. (See, for example, the
revealing analysis by Paul Bois, Cahiers de doléances du tiers état de la sénéchaussée de Château-du-
Loir pour les Etats généraux de 1789 [Gap: Imprimerie Louis-Jean, 1960], chap. 4.) In short,
everything suggests deliberate selection. And why not select a more articulate, expressive, and
forceful statement of one’s own genuinely held demands? Numerous other charges and objections
have been raised against the cahiers, discussion of which wiBbe found mGilbert Shapiro and John
Markoff, "L’authenticité des cahiers,” Bulletin <fHistoire de la Révolution Française (1990-91):
17-70, andRevolutionaryDemands.
James S cott29 urges us to accept "the public transcript,” the statem ents that
the top dogs and bottom dogs make to each other, as having only the
m ost uncertain relationship to the several “hidden transcripts,” what the
dom inators or the underclass say am ong them selves. The cahiers are doubly
public: first, they are negotiated in a public forum am ong villagers, nobles
or elite urbanites; second, they are addressed to a much w ider audience.
We m ight som etim es imagine several possible m odels o f private transcripts
that are consistent with the public one, but direct glim pses o f anything but
another public one, adopted to other circum stances, are rare.30 W hen w e
shift away from grievances tow ard insurrections and legislation in Chapter
5, w e are seeing other public acts, too. W hen peasants tell a pair o f visiting
investigators what a m aypole m eans (see p. 604) w e may w onder, even if
the investigators d o not, w hether they have been told what the villagers say
am ong them selves.
C onsider the three sorts o f docum ents w e shall be exploring h ere. W ho
speaks in them ? A s a rough approxim ation: In the cahiers o f the parishes w e
hear the peasants o f rural France, even though such outsiders as local
priests, urban law yers, and seigneurial judges may have aided or hindered
in their drafting. N o doubt, it was the m ore affluent m em bers o f the rural
com m unity w hose voices w eighed m ost heavily. In the cahiers the deputies
o f the Third E state carried to Versailles, w e probably hear the positions o f
the non-noble portion o f the upper reaches o f urban France. B y w ay o f
sim plification, but not, w e contend, oversim plification, w e may speak o f
those represented in these texts as the urban notables; notables w ho have
an e y e on the upheavals around them and w ho are certainly responsive to
som e degree to the rural grievances carried by the delegates from the
parishes. In light o f the role played by these "general” cahiers o f the Third
E state in our subsequent discussion, it is im portant to forestall som e
term inological confusion. Although "T hird E state” had the very broad
m eaning o f the overw helm ing m ajority o f the French people, those neither
clergy nor noble, in the context o f the cahiers w e shall som etim es refer
m uch m ore narrow ly to the w ell-to-do higher reaches o f non-noble France:
the legal, m edical, scientific professionals; the w riters, m erchants, and
financiers; the substantial landholders and those vying as the com m on
phrase had it, "to live nobly” ; in a w ord, the "n otables.” It was these
notables w ho dom inated the drafting o f those cahiers. Particularly when
com paring various cahiers with one another, by “ Third E state” w e shall
often m ean, not the entire range o f non-noble France, but this non-noble
29. James C. Scott, Domination andtheArts ofResistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven: Yale
30. And, arguably, nonexistent Even one’s memories erf one’s dreams may be tailored to an
im agined anàm ne*.
d ite . A s for the nobility, this first genuinely dem ocratic election am ong the
privileged produced a num ber o f surprises, and w e would judge these
docum ents broadly representative o f France’s Second E state and not ju st
the greatest and the m ost pow erful But w e m ust rem em ber that these are
all public statem ents: they are what villagers, urban elites, and nobles
thought shrew d or prudent to say to each other, and to other significant
actors as w ell, such as the clergy (w hose ow n cahiers are not represented
h ere), or the king and his agents and supporters. T h ese are, to be sure,
very im portant assertions— fundam ental in fa c t31
W hich docum ents should w e include in our sam ple? A large num ber o f
cahiers representing many groups w as produced, and the statistical analysis
o f all o f them is altogether im possible.32 Som e sort o f sam ple is necesary.
We decided to cod e the extant general cahiers o f the Third E state and
nobility and a sam ple o f the cahiers o f the parishes. We feel that this ch oice
o f docum ent type gives a good coverage o f the diversity o f political leanings,
at the cost, to be sure, o f om itting the enorm ously significant clergy. T he
sam ples o f the noble and Third E state cahiers are not particularly problem
atic but our coding o f few er than 2% o f the parish cahiers requires m ore
com m ent We believe w e have good reason to regard this as a rather
representative national sam ple.
A rather detailed exploration that com pared the bailliages from which the
parish cahiers w ere sam pled to France as a w hole revealed that our sam ple
is a bit too urban.33 Our parishes, in other w ords, tend to be m ore likely to
have a large tow n nearby than would a fully representative sam ple. O ther
elem ents that go along with a large tow n are also overrepresented— m ost
im portant, insurrection.34 The parishes w hose cahiers w e exam ine w ere,
31. For further discussion of some of these issues, see Shapiro and Markoff, “L'authenticité
des cahiers.”
32. Opinions differ widely as to the total number of cahiers produced. Edmé Champion suggests
that there were more thanfifty thousand. Beatrice Hysiop, a more recent authority, guesses “more
than twenty-five thousand.” Albert Soboul offers sixty thousand. The estimate of the total number
of cahiers actually written is an extremely hazardous task. In the first place, there were roughly
forty thousand rural communes; but in some instances the “parish” in the convocation sense
encompassed a number of such districts. The number of preliminary cahiers of the clergy, wide
conceivably enormous, is totally unknown, for these documents have rarely been studied, reprinted,
or even catalogued. The number of cahiers written by urban corporate groups is also rather obscure,
because unlike the rural parishes, urban groups often failed to exercise their option of writing down
their grievances; we cannot therefore assume that the number of assemblies entitled to draft cahiers
is a good approximation of the number who did so. (Edmé Champion, La France d'après les cahiers
de 1789 (Paris: A. Cohn, 1897), 21; Hyslop, Guide, ix-x; Soboul, Précis (THistoire de la Rtmhdhm
Française (Paris: Editions Sociales, 1962), 103-4.
33. For a much more detailed account, see Gilbert Shapiro, John Markoff, and Silvio R. Duncan
Baretta, “The Selective TVansmission of Historical Documents: The Case of the Parish Cahiers of
1789,” Histoire et Mesure 2 (1987): 115-72.
34. For the relationship of towns and rural insurrection, see Chapter 7, as wefl as John Markoff,
th erefore, som ew hat m ore likely than a perfectly random ly chosen group
would be to have had insurrectionary events nearby in 1789. But these
effects are small and alm ost anything else w e could m easure is unrelated to
inclusion in our sam ple.
The Rural World of Burdens

Table 2.1 displays the fifty m ost w idely discussed institutions o f eighteenth-
century F rance.35 For each group o f cahiers, the subjects are arranged in
the order o f frequency o f discussion, with those m ost discussed listed firs t
For exam ple, “ taxation in general" is discussed in m ore cahiers o f the
parishes and o f the Third Estate than any other subject; for the nobility,
how ever, pride o f piace goes to “ regular m eetings o f the Estates-G eneraL ”
T h ose entries linked by brackets are tied in frequency.36
A look at the three groups o f cahiers brings out the special character o f
each group’s grievances. D espite som e com m on concerns, there are clear
differences in priorities. The nobility are particularly likely to address the
organization and authority o f the com ing Estates-G eneraL N ot only is the
issue o f regular m eetings (as opposed to infrequent convocation at the whim
o f the m onarch) their m ost w idely discussed subject, but there are also a
large num ber o f other dem ands concerning either the procedures (“ vote by
order” )37 or the authority ("v eto on taxation,” “ m inisterial responsibility’’) o f
that body. The nobility, m oreover, are unusually keen to treat civil liberties:
notice the presence on this list o f such subjects as censorship, personal
liberties, lettres de cachet (arbitrary authorizations o f im prisonm ent), and
secrecy o f the mails. The com m on thread that links these subjects is no
doubt a concern with arbitrary central authority, also shown in discussions
o f a w ritten constitution or o f the royal authority to transfer cases from one
court to another. It seem s likely that the w eight o f noble concern for "law s,”
as w ell as the codification o f law into criminal and civil cod es is also part and
“The Social Geography of Rural Revolt at the Beginning of the French Revolution,” American
SociologicalReview SO(1965): 761-81, and “Contexts and Forms of Rural Revolt France in 1789,"
Journal ofConflictResolution 30 (1986): 253-89.
35. In the terminology developed earlier, we are exploring our Level 4 categories.
36. Several subjects shared last place for the nobility, which forced a relaxation of the restriction
to fifty subjects. This restriction to the top fifty is, to be sure, quite arbitrary, but it is adequate for
iluminating the gulf that separated the great rural majority from the elites. For another analysis at
the most widespread demands, see Shapiro and Markoff, RevolutionaryDemands, chap. 14.
37. A major debate raged over whether the deputies at the Estates-Genera) were to vote
individualy ("by head”) or "by order," with each of the three orders having one vote, the latter
procedure widely viewed as a brake on reforms that might threaten the privileged.
Table 2.1. Subjects Most Widely Discussed in Cahiers, Ranked by Frequency of Di
Regional and local roads Court officers who supervised Tax on legal acts (droit de contrôle)
auctions (priseurs)
ë
I
I S
'S
I
i ,
Ü -s 2
3 1 CO
O H
00
H CNJ N
N
N
M
N
^
N
Ifl
N N
N
N S 8 S CO » 8
in general Thx on alcoholic beverages (aides) Ennoblem ent through office-holding
Ih x on alcoholic beverages (aides)

New taxes in general
pared o f this aristocratic sensitivity to Varbitraire.x In this concern with

the arbitrary prerogatives o f central authority, w e may discern the deep
aristocratic roots o f the liberal assault on the Old Regim e, as argued, for
exam ple, by D enis R ich et3 39
8
If the greater stress on civil liberties by the nobility com pared to the
Third E state surprises, w e need w ily recall w hose local, traditional, or
group “liberties" w ere continually nibbled away by the expanding authority
o f the m onarchical state. The nascent bureaucratic structures o f this state
evinced tendencies to standardization and uniform ity that threatened to iron
out the quirky distinctions that m ade one region and one social group unlike
another. T he noble-dom inated high courts— the parlements— had for som e
tim e been at the forefron t o f open and explicit confrontation with royal
authority and w ere thus especially sensitive to high-handed arbitrary tactics
used against them that denied their liberty to protest, jailed or exiled them
w ithout m uch by way o f legal procedures, and the like. It is plausible that
what began as a reactive defense o f their liberties (in the plural) had becom e,
by 1789, a cham pioning o f liberty.
T he classic statem ent o f the great historic significance o f the struggles o f
the m onarchical state to penetrate, control, and rationalize the kingdom is
Tocqueville’s .40 For Tocqueville the nobility are significant not m erely as the
purveyors o f a liberal critique o f the state’s capricious pow er but also as the
target o f attacks on their ow n position: The slow strangulation o f their
independent action by the grow ing state rem oved from them the functions
that alone perm itted others— w hether w ell-off, educated, elite com m oners
or im poverished, perhaps sem iliterate peasants— to tolerate their status.
A s w e glance at their positions in their ow n cahiers w e shall certainly see (in
this and the next chapter) such a hostility to privilege on the part o f elite
com m oners and peasants; and w e shall have an opportunity to explore later
on w hether the regional pattern o f antiseigneurial rural revolt is consistent
38. The range of fiberal sentiment in the noble cahiers has been copiously documented in two
fine studies: Guy Chaussinand-Nogaret, La noblesse au XVIIIe siicle: De la féodalité aux ¡unñtres
(Paris: Hachette, 1976), 181-226; and Sasha R. Weitman, “Bureaucracy, Democracy and the
French Revolution” (Ph.D. diss., Washington University, 1968). By contrast Ludmila Pimenova
stressed the extent of noble conservatism. See her Dvorianstvo nakanune velikoi fnmtsuxshoi
revotíutsü (Moscow: IzdateTstvo Universiteta, 1986), summarized in “La Noblesse à la veille de la
Révolution” in La Grande Révolution française (Moscow: Editions “Naouka,” 1989), 37-64, and
“Das sozialpolitische Programm des Adels am lfocabend der Französischen Revolution,” JUMucfi
für Geschichte 39 (1989): 179-201.
39. For Richet the "bourgeois” contribution to the Enfightenment is a relatively late graft on an
already well developed tree. Denis Riebet, “Autor des origines idéologiques lointaines de la
Révolution française: élites et despotisme,“ Annales: Economies, Sociétés, Civilisations 9 (1969):
1-23; La France moderne: L’espritdes institutions (Paris: Flammarion, 1973).
40. Alexis de Tocquevfle, The OldRegime and theFrench Revolution.
wtih the Tocquevillean expectation that it would be particularly com m on

w here the hand o f the state was particularly heavy (see Chapter 7).
If noble concern for political liberties is striking, the salience o f "private
property” may strike som e as little short o f astonishing. If it may be
paradoxical, in term s used by som e M arxists, to note a relatively greater
concern with “ bourgeois liberties” am ong the nobility than the Third E state,
it is downright startling that "private property,” that w atchw ord o f the
bourgeois order, is the nobles’ 12th m ost com m on subject and only 36th for
the Third. Tocqueville and D enis R ichet helped us with the first paradox,
but what o f the second? One bridge may be suggested by those noble
cahiers that couple liberty and property, perhaps invoking natural law .41 The
nobility often appeal to “ property” when defending them selves against state
taxation42 as w ell as threats to seigneurial rights.43 Property is often held to
be "inviolable and sacred .”44 The nobles o f B elley go so far as to assert that
the only purpose o f society is the protection “ o f the property and persons
o f each individual by the strength o f all” (A P 2:480). This linkage o f property
and liberty in a context o f w ariness about state taxation in particular and
state authority in general— indeed the subordination o f state purposes to
the defense o f property— show s the deep penetration o f a Lockean rhetoric
into the French nobility.45
We shall see below that when the nobility defend seigneurial rights in
their cahiers,46it is often done by invoking the sacred character o f property.
41. For example, the cahier of the nobility of Angers; see Jérôme Mavida] and E. Laurent, eds.,
Archives parlementaires de 1787 à 1860, 1st ser. (Paris: Librairie Administrative de Paul Dupont,
1862-), 2:32. This work will be abbreviatedAP throughout
42. For example, the joint cahier of the nobility and dergy of Lixheim, AP 5:714.
43. For example, in the course of the failed efforts of the three orders at a consensual document
in Bourg-en-Bresse, the Third Estate proposal of restoring the tithe to its intended function was
opposed by the nobility as an infringement of property rights. While they did not specify whose
property rights, the clergy’s response probably illuminates a discussion that did not enter the
document: the clergy supported the Third’s proposal, but specified that it was the “infeudated
tithe,” the tithe that had passed from clerics into the hands of lay lords, that was to be addressed.
SeeAP 2:458.
44. For example, AP 2:281.
45. John Locke, Of Civil Government, 7ko Treatises (London: J. M. Dent, 1924), 180: “The
great and chief end, therefore, of men uniting into commonwealths, and putting themselves under
government, is the preservation of their property.” The specific phrase "inviolable and sacred” had
cropped up among champions of property rights in and out of France for some decades, as in the
physiocrat Lemerder in 1770 or Adam Smith in 1776. See Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature
and Causes of the Wealth ofNations (London: Everyman's Library, 1910), 110; Steven L. Kaplan,
La Bagarre: Galianas "Lost” Parody (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1979), 39. (For other examples
from physiocratic writing see Weulersse, Le mouvementphysiocratique en France (de 1756 à 1770)
[Paris: Félix Alcan, 1910], 1:4-5.)
46. See Chapter 3. Later, when anyone defended the continued collection of seigneurial dues on
the floor of the National Assembly, it was almost exclusively in terms of property rights. See
Chapter9.
Is this noble stress cm property— and not an immutable and perhaps divinely
sanctioned social order— a pow erful sym ptom o f som e Tocquevillean p rocess
o f cultural adaptation to the antihierarchical leveling o f the state? O r m ight it
be better described as the cultural aspect o f an increasing centrality o f the
m arket, a p rocess that M arxists might speak o f as an em bourgeoisem ent o f
the nobility? And what sort— or sorts— o f property do they have in mind?
W e shall return to these questions below .
The nobility are also distinctive for the salience o f their concern with
governm ent expenditures. Their cahiers are the m ost likely to take up
governm ent borrow ing and indebtedness, the m eans o f repaym ent (including
the royal domain, w hose possible sale was w idely bruited about as a partial
solution to governm ent debt), the expenses o f the governm ent (including
the pensions by which obligations to the loyal and fears o f the dangerous
w ere m et), accountability for governm ent expenditures, as w ell as the issue
o f a v eto for the E states-G eneral in taxation m atters. N ot that these issues
are nonexistent for the others, but they occupy relatively greater salience
for the nobility, as dem onstrated by their ranking on Table 2 .1 . The link
with oth er distinctive noble concerns is not hard to find: the grow th o f
central state authority and the consequent loss o f their proud autonom y is
o f a piece with the grow th o f uncontrolled state expenditures and the
m ounting shortages o f revenues. The state debt is at the sam e tim e a
consequence o f state expansion and a likely cause o f further expansion as
the state grapples for new pow ers to fill its em pty coffers even as it further
encroaches on any independent forces in civil society .47 And last but
assuredly not least, governm ent debt was am ong the strongest m otives
that energized a series o f m inisterial attem pts to w eaken the claim s o f
fiscal privilege.48
For its part, the Third E state is notew orthy for its em phases on privilege
and on barriers to the developm ent o f the m arket In the general area o f
privilege, note the relatively w idespread concern with w hether the E states-
G eneral is to maintain the traditional distinctions am ong the orders under
which the clergy, nobility, and Third E state each get one vote collectively
or w hether each deputy has an individually counted vote. N ote, too, the
47. Consider our entire corpus of 26,230 grievances of the nobles and 46,376 grievances of the
Third Estate. Of these a rather higher proportion of noble demands concern the very broad area of
“government" (38% vs. 32%). Among grievances that deal with “government,” we find that
“government finances” are more salient for the nobility (21% vs. 14%).
48. One might find in the joint stress on liberties and finances support for (and greater
specification of) James Riley’s proposal that the central liberties under debate from the 1760s on
were precisely concerned with“the despotismof the tax collector.” Our data suggest the conjunction
of liberty and finance to be particularly characteristic of the nobility. See James C. Riley, The Seven
Years War and the Old Regime m France: The Economic and Financial TbU(Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1986), 218.
concerns over blocked careers in the m ilitary, the heavy tax cm sales o f
noble land to com m oners (.franc-fief ) and the privileged access o f nobles to
higher courts in first instance (commitiimus). B y w ay o f contrast to this last
item , the nobles, not overconcerned with issues erf privilege, are very
concerned with royal authority over court procedure and tend to discuss
royal prerogatives to shift cases from one court to another— or even to an
adm inistrative authority. The prem ier problem in the judicial system for the
Third is a noble privilege; for the nobility, it is an instance o f the heavy hand
o f royal interference.
A s for hindrances to the m arket, note that am ong those taxes or
seigneurial rights o f greatest concern am ong the urban notables, one finds
precisely those that m ost interfere with the free m ovem ent o f com m odities,
the sale o f land, or the price o f labor. Thus, they are especially prone to
take up custom s duties, the tax on noble land sales m entioned above, the
lord 's right to collect tolls, seigneurial claim s on com pulsory peasant labor in
field or château, or the w hole range o f seigneurial m onopolies. T he notables’
concern with the w eights and m easures w hose great and m ysterious variety
was a considerable nuisance to long-distance com m erce is also a clear
instance o f such a concern, especially when taken in conjunction with
seigneurial and royal tolls. What could m ore vividly summon up an im age o f
human folly creating obstacles to social wealth than the m ultiple inspections
and associated losses o f tim e and m oney occasioned by searches, unload
ings, arguing, tolls, taxes, consultation o f rate-schedules, bribes, breakage,
and spoilage at the vast num ber o f collection points at which goods m ight be
assessed at different rates and in different units o f m easurem ent?
A s different as nobility and Third E state are from one another, how ever,
the greater contrast, by far, is betw een the nobility and Third E state on the
(Hie hand, and the parishes on the other. The people o f the French
countryside voice the concerns o f the elites in very lim ited m easure. The
rural people appear minimally interested in political structures; som ew hat in
econom ic developm ent, in governm ent finances only insofar as taxation is
concerned, and in tax privilege (but not other form s o f privilege); and not at
all in civil liberties.49 But what is im pressive is the frequency with which
they take up the m aterial exactions with which they are burdened. Like the
Third E state, their single m ost com m on subject is taxation in general, but
unlike the Third E state— for whom m atters concerning the E states-G eneral
or regional self-governm ent in the form o f Provincial E states are alm ost as
significant— these rather general com plaints are follow ed by grievances
about specific taxes. A t the head o f the list, the salt tax, which was assessed
at rates that varied considerably with region but that w ere often quite high,
49. While censorship, for example, is among the top ten topics for nobility andThird Estate, it is
relegated to the 233d position by the parishes.
w as m ade m ore burdensom e still in those parts o f the kingdom in which a

minimum salt purchase w as m andated.50 C lose behind the salt tax is a
com plex group o f taxes, known as the aides, which w ere levied principally
though not exclusively on alcoholic beverages. T h ese in turn are follow ed
by the droit de contrôle, an om nipresent tax on the registration o f legal
transactions. Our data indicate that the significance o f this tax as a focu s o f
resentm ent in the French countryside is not adequately reflected in m ost o f
the historical literature in which this levy is overshadow ed by others like the
taille, w hich are actually rather less w idely made the subjects o f griev
an ces.51
Looking further down the list one may observe many oth er taxation
concern s. T here is the royal corvée, the com pulsory labor services on the
royal roads, transm uted in a recen t reform into a m oney tax; there is the
taille, the main direct tax o f the Old Regim e, in principle assessed w ith an
eye on landed wealth, but hopelessly riddled w ith regional variations and so
saddled with privileged exem ptions that it was a mark o f low status to pay
it T h ere are various taxes that initially w ere intended to be m ore uniform
in their assessm ent (capitation, vingtième). T h ere are proposals for tax
reform (impôt unique, impôt territorial), discussions o f tax privileges, discus
sions o f agencies o f tax collection .52
This rural concern for taxes is sim ply unm atched by the elites. O f the ten
subjects m ost w idely discussed in the parish cahiers, eight concern taxes, in
contrast with four each for the Third E state and the nobility. T he m ost
frequent peasant demand that bears on the E states-G eneral is sym ptom atic.
W hile various m atters concerning the anticipated gathering o f that body are
tow ard the very top o f the lists for the Third E state and nobility, the
E states-G eneral is only m entioned in 17th place by the parishes— and the
50. To these demands might be added those many rural grievances concerning the government’s
salt monopoly, for which we have created a distinct category but which is part and parcel oí the
institutional context cSthe gabelle.
51. The valuable essay by François Hincker, for example, virtualy ignores the droit de contrôle
and related taxes. See François Hincker, Les français devant impôt sous rancien regime (Paris:
Flammarion, 1971). I defer reflecting on the significance of the frequency oí grievances about this
particular tax until Chapter 3, p. 107.
52. On taxation, see Marcel Marion, Les impôts directs sous rancien régime principalement au
XVIIIe siècle (Geneva: Slatkine-Megariotis Reprints, 1974) as well asHistoirefinancière de la France
depuis 1715 (Paris: Rousseau, 1914), voL 1; Gabriel Ardant, Théorie sociologique de iimpôt (Paris:
Service d'Edition et de Vente des Publications de l’Education Nationale, 1965); J. F. Bosher, French
Finances, 1770-1795. From Business to Bureaucracy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1970); George T. Matthews, The Royal General Farms m Eighteenth-Century France (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1958) as well as a great deal of material on tax reform debates in the
various works of Georges Weulersse on the physiocratic movement: Mouvementphysiocratique; La
physiocrahe sous les ministères de Turgot de Nicker (1774-1781) (Paris: Presses Universitaires de
France, 1950); La physiocratie à taube de la Révolution (1781-1792) (Paris: Editions de l’Ecole des
Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, 1985).
specific subject is a proposed veto (Hi taxation. The intensely debated issue
o f the voting rules for the E states-G eneral (vote by head vs. vote by ord er),
one o f the questions that m ost deeply divided the Third E state from the
nobility, only figures in 40th place as a rural concern. T he even m ore
divisive subject53 o f opportunities to achieve high office is not represented
am ong the peasant top fifty at all.
T he claim s o f the state, w eighty as they are, hardly exhaust the rural
sense o f burden, for the claim s o f church and lord m ust be considered as
w ell. Tw o rather different form s o f ecclesiastical exaction are treated with
som e frequency. The tithe, a com pulsory paym ent o f a portion o f the crop,
w as subject to w ide variation in the rate at which it was assessed and the
crops on which it was to be levied. W hile it was in principle justified as
support o f the pastoral activities o f the parish priest, it often w ent in practice
to a tithe-holder w ho was expected to provide for the priest and the upkeep
o f the church building. The casuels w ere irregular paym ents rendered upon
the perform ance o f special functions, for exam ple, a m arriage cerem on y.54
N otice that only the casuels are am ong the Third E state’s top fifty and both
tithe and casuels are om itted by the nobles.
If clerical exactions cam e in tw o main kinds, the lord’s claim s cam e in
many. Am ong the m ost com m on objects o f com plaint w e find a num ber o f
seigneurial recreational privileges. The lord’s pigeons and the lord’s hunts
w ere som etim es experienced as airborne and groundbased assaults on
peasant crops, as John Q . C. M ackrell puts i t 55 The seigneurial court, as
the institutional m echanism by which the lord could com pel paym ents, has
often been seen as critical to the entire system o f seigneurial rights (although
recently there has been som e challenge to this view ).56 The m onopoly on
milling was one o f several seigneurial m onopolies. The m iller was charged
quite a high fee for his protected m onopoly and he passed it on to his
custom ers. M utation fees (lods et ventes) w ere assessed (at a generally high
rate) when land changed hands. Cens et rentes, finally, w as a periodic cash
paym ent often com posed, as its com pound name suggests, as an amalgam
o f a variety o f paym ents that might individually bear a very w ide range o f
designations. T h ese seigneurial subjects are for less salient for the urban
notables and the nobles: the cahiers of the Third E state include only four
53. For one attempt at measuring the extent of the differences between the Third Estate and
nobles over various issues, see Shapiro and Markoff, RevolutionaryDemands, chap. 15.
54. Timothy Tackett, Priest and Parish m Eighteenth-Century France. A Social and Political
Study of the Curts in the Diocese ofDauphiné, 1750-1791 (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1977), 130-31.
55. John Q. C. MackreO, The Attack on "Feudalism” m Eighteenth-Century France (London:
Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973), 4-5.
56. Lefebvre, ñeysans du Nord, 117-18, 124-25; Ohren H. Hufton, “Le paysan et la loi en
France au XVIIIe siècle, ” Annales: Economies, Sociétés, Civilisations 38 (1983): 679-701.
seigneurial subjects am ong their m ost w idely discussed issues; for the
nobles the count is a very eloquent zero.
T he w orld o f the country people is a w orld o f burdens. We have
concentrated on taxes, seigneurial daim s, clerical paym ents; yet when w e
exam ine the other topics in Table 2 .1, w e find that what is left over still
includes various claim s on resou rces in the parish cahiers to a greater extent
than in the other tw o collection s o f docum ents. The militia, a low -status
conscripted adjunct to the arm y w hose m em bers w ere virtually all peasants,
ranks 23d am ong peasant grievances (and the draft by lot specifically ranks
41st); for the urban notables the form er category is 37th and for the nobility
not am ong the first fifty at all; the specific subject o f the draft is not am ong
the m ost w idespread concerns o f the elites. Serving for years as a “ soldier
dishonored by his situation” 57 (or the difficult efforts to evade such service)
surely added to the rural sense o f burden.58
The differences am ong the three groups are often revealing when they
confront the sam e institutional sphere. On m ilitary m atters, the nobility, for
whom a martial im age was often an im portant com ponent o f a public
identity,59 have a substantial num ber o f grievances on such varied subjects
that they constitute a large but quite “ m iscellaneous” category. T he Third
E state’s prim ary concern is with a m ilitary career in which any aspiration to
high rank w as essentially blocked. But the rural com m unities are interested
neither in the details o f m ilitary affairs nor in career problem s. The militia
(“ also a tax” as the village o f Beaulieu-en-Argorme observes)60 and the
associated draft are the salient m ilitary issues for them .
To exam ine a very different institutional arena, all three collection s o f
docum ents evin ce a concern for legal procedures and the judicial apparatus.
W hile the arbitrary pow ers em bodied in the lettres de cachet head such
concern s for nobility and Third E state (and m ore so for the form er than the
latter), such issues are not the principal concerns o f the rural com m unities.
57. Cahier of the parish of Hiis, bailliage of Bigorre (Gaston Balende, ed., Cahiers de doléances
de la sinéchausée de Bigarre pour les états généraux de 1789 [Tarbes: Imprimerie Lesbordes,
1925], 297).
58. On rural evasion and resistance to conscription, see André Corvisier, L’arméefrançaise de la
fin du XVlle siècle au ministire de ChoiseuL Le soldat (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France,
1964), 1:222-31.
59. Consider the frequency with which the French nobility chose military officers to represent
them at the Estates-GeneraL See David Bien, “La réaction aristocratique avant 1789: L’exemple
de l’armée,” Annales: Economies, Sociétés, Civilisations 29 (1974): 23-48, 505-34; Edna Hindie
Lemay, "Les révélations d’un dictionnaire: du nouveau sur la composition de l’Assemblée Nationale
Constituante (1789-1791),” Annales Historiques de la Révolution Française, no. 284 (1991): 175;
Timothy Tackett, Becoming a Revolutionary: The Deputies of the French NationalAssembly and the
Emergence ofa Revolutionary Culture (1789-1790) (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996).
60. Gustave Laurent, ed., Cahiers de doléances pour les états généraux de 1789, voL 1, Bailliage
de Châlons-sur-Marne (Epemay. Imprimerie Henri ViDers, 1960), 71.
Pride o f place, for them , goes to the seizures o f property and subsequent
court-ordered auctions that made life m iserable for the indebted and indi
g en t W hile the urban notables evin ce a sim ilar, if not quite so pressing,
concern along these latter lines, it is only in the countryside that one finds
the fees for the services o f legal professionals to be much o f an issue. W hile
in 42d place in the villages, legal fees are only tied for 125th place am ong
Third E state dem ands. Certainly the urban attorneys w ho played a central
role in the assem blies o f the Third Estate w ere unlikely to com plain bitterly,
as did a village in Lorraine, o f the financial ruin w reaked by “Jew s, guards,
and law yers.”61
In village France, the significant institutions are burdens. I would judge
thirty-eight o f the fifty m ost w idely discussed institutions to fall under that
rubric.62 This may be contrasted with tw enty-tw o for the Third E state, at
m ost ten for the nobility.63 A different com putation perm its us to see even
m ore vividly the significance o f the extraction o f resou rces from the
peasantry, w hether in cash, kind, or labor. Table 2.2 treats the dem ands in
the cahiers as an aggregate. B y thus examining the entire body o f griev
ances, w e see that grievances concerning m aterial exactions acount for
m ore than tw o peasant grievances in five, a considerably higher proportion
than is the case for the higher-status groups. A t least as striking from this
perspective is the observation that for all the real difference betw een the
Third E state and the nobility in the salience o f such issu es, that difference
is dwarfed by the abyss that separates either from the countryside.64
Regardless o f the w eight o f specific exactions, L efebvre’s focu s on
peasant burdens is thus true to their ow n expressed concerns. The present
analysis also confirm s Taylor’s case that the specific constitutional issues
that agitated the revolutionary leadership are virtually absent from the
parish assem blies. Equally w orthy o f attention is the relative w eight o f
different sorts o f burden. In the countryside taxation is the focu s o f
considerably m ore discussion than seigneurial rights. Indeed there are
61. R Lesprand and L Bout, eds., Cahiers de doléances desprévôtés baiUiagèns de Sambourget
Phaisbourg et du bailliage de Uxheim pour les états généraux de 1789 (Metz: Imprimerie Paul Even,
1938), 248.
62. I considered a subject to be an instance of a burden if it dealt with claims by state, church,
or lord butnot if the central focus is on the use or management of resources once exacted. I did not
consider the subject of roads, for example, as a burden—even though they were constructed by
exaction of labor and money. (But one wonders whether the great salience of roads in the parish
cahiers might not be due to the coerced rural labor that built and maintained them.) Others might,
therefore, differ slightly on how many of these topics they would call burdens.
63. The ambiguity of the nobility resides in the tie for last place, which includes taxes and
other grievances.
64. If we considered other appropriations of resources (legal fees, for example, or militia service)
these figures would not only be a bit higher, but the difference between village France and the elites
would be also somewhat greater.
S eigneurial R ights on th e R evolutionary Agenda 41
M l e 2 .2 . G rievances Concerning Burdens (% )
Type o f Burden Parishes Third Estate Nobility
Taxation 32% 16% 15%

Clerical tithe and casuels 4 2 1
Seigneurial regim e 10 7 3
Total burdens 46 24 19
(AO (27,742) (46,376) (26,230)
parish cahiers that d o not even m ention the seigneurial regim e at alL Table
2 .3 show s a num ber o f other things as w ell Although a sm aller proportion
o f Third E state grievances treat it, alm ost all Third E state cahiers have at
least som e discussion.66 B y com parison, the fact that m ore than one-fifth o f
noble cahiers pay no attention w hatsoever is quite striking. The noble
cahiers are far longer than those o f the parishes, yet they typically contain
no m ore discussion o f seigneurial institutions. In short, the nobility tend to
be silent on the seigneurial system , a critical point to which w e shall return.
But a significant m inority o f parishes are also silen t
A t the on set o f revolution, then, the seigneurial rights w ere sim ply not
the predom inant rural concern, if the cahiers are any guide. It would be hard
to predict, from the sheer fo d o f attention o f their cahiers, the antiseigneurial
character com ing to be taken by the grow ing rural insurrection (see Chapter
Thble 2 .3 . Grievances on Seigneurial Regime (% )
Attention to
Seigneurial Regime Parishes Third Estate Nobility
Docum ents that have at least one

grievance treating any aspect o f 77% 96% 79%
seigneurial regim e (AT = 748) (IV = 198) (IV = 166)
Mean number o f grievances on seigneurial
regim e in docum ent (B ase: all
docum ents) 4.4 16.9 4.4
Mean number o f grievances on seigneurial
regim e among docum ents mentioning
seigneurial regim e at least once 5.7 17.4 5.5
Mean number o f all grievances in

docum ent (B ase: all docum ents) 40 234 158
65. We see an important element of daims that the Third Estate is more radical than the
parishes. The considerably greater length of the general cahiers of the Third means that they will
tend to have more grievances about anything even if those matters are relatively less weighty. The
sheer number of demands implies nothing about which aspects of the seigneurial regime are
(focussed let alone what is said about those aspects.
6, p. 281). And as w e shall see in Chapter 6, in the early stages o f

breakdown o f the old order, and certainly through M arch 1789 when m ost
parish docum ents w ere w ritten, they w ere not the dominant target o f
collective action in the countryside either. We need to rethink the question
posed by Le R oy Ladurie, o f identifying the structural changes that led the
Old Regim e to go dow n under the blow s o f an antiseigneurial countryside
that had m oved away from the anti-taxation focu s o f the great m ovem ents
o f the seventeenth century. A s late as that first spring o f rev olu ti«! the
parish grievances w ere far m ore focu sed on taxation. Indeed, as w e shall
see below , throughout the eighteenth century taxation w as m ore often a
target o f insurrection than seigneurial rights (see p. 16; Chapter 5, p. 264).
We will need, then, to consider why the revolutionary countryside came
to take an overw helm ingly antiseigneurial cou rse. The cahiers m ay yet tell
us som ething o f why that antiseigneurial tum cam e about, rather than the
m ore traditional anti-taxation thrust w hose continuation into the great
revolution m ight w ell have been anticipated on the basis o f the overall
quantity o f dem ands.66 If the claim s o f the distant and abstract state occupied
m ore rural attention, w e shall see (in Chapter 3) that at the beginning o f the
Revolution the claim s o f the lord and church w ere seen as having a different
and fundamentally less tolerable character.
Faces of the Seigneurial Regime

W hich particular seigneurial rights m attered m ost to peasants, to nobles,
and to urban elites? First o f all w e shall group the discussions o f the
seigneurial regim e under a num ber o f broad rubrics. Table 2 .4 show s the
percentage o f docum ents that have at least one grievance concerning any o f
nineteen broad aspects o f the seigneurial regim e, am ong all docum ents that
discuss the lord’s rights at all. We see, for exam ple, that am ong those parish
docum ents that discuss the seigneurial regim e the seigneurial cou rts are
discussed in 29% . Table 2 .4 , then, indicates how w idespread concern w ith
that category w as.
Peasants: Still More Burdens

The three groups o f docum ents not only differ from one another in their
attention to seigneurial rights, but they also differ in which kinds o f rights
they would place on the public agenda. We are struck first o f all by the vast
66. Looking ahead to Chapter 6 we wiDsee that attacks on the seigneurial regime had risen from
very «mall numbers to 28% of all rural revolts by March 1789 (and would be climbing much higher).
See Table 6.3.
T able 2 .4 . Documents that Discuss Particular A spects o f Seigneurial Regime (% )
A spect o f
Seigneurial Regime Parishes Third Estate Nobility
Seigneurial courts 29% 65% 32%

Seigneurial regim e in
general 24 47 26
Seigneurial m onopolies 38 79 15
Symbolic deference 11 30 48
Labor services 18 57 10
Periodic dues Cmcash or
Und) 50 65 15
Dues on property transfers 24 44 8
Formal acts o f recognition o f
seigneurial rights 2 15 8
Recreational privileges 42 71 24
Seigneurial agents 5 25 8
Serfdom 9 28 8
Seigneurial tods 13 61 30
Rights over fairs and
markets 3 24 6
Protection rights 0 17 2
Requisition rights 1 0 0
Seigneurial aspects o f land
tenure 13 37 26
Seigneurial aspects o f
communal rights 11 18 2
Tax advantages o f seigneurs 2 3 1
Other* 19 51 20
m (564) (193) (131)
Note: Totals sum to over 100% since documents may have more than one grievance concerning
seigneurial regime.
■Combines: (1) Miscellaneous seigneurial rights which have no more specific code; (2) seigneurial
aspects of any institution not indicated here; (3) incomplete seigneurial codes.
"Only includes documents that discuss the seigneurial regime.
gulf that separates the peasants from their noble lords. For the peasants,
the m ost w idely discussed aspects o f the regim e are the periodic dues.
T h ese paym ents w ere quite varied in character. The cens w as an annual
cash paym ent w hose value had generally been eroded with several centuries
o f inflation, but w hose paym ent was taken to signify recognition o f the entire
body o f rights due the lord. In the legal language o f the day, paym ent o f the
cens constituted acknowledgm ent o f the lord’s “ d irect,” which is to say the
body o f seigneurial rights.67 Eighteenth-century jurists distinguished tw o
67. Robert Pothier, Tnátt desfie/s, avec un titre sur le cens (Orléans: Montaut, 1776) 2:373-75;
Joseph Renauldon, Dictionnaire des fiefs et des droits seigneuriaux utiles et honorifiques (Paris:
d u sters o f property rights: domaine direct and domaine utile. Domaine utile
consisted o f the rights to exploit, rent, sell, and bequeath land, although
these rights m ight be subject to various restrictions as a consequence o f la
directe. Thus domaine utile resem bles what w e m ean today by ow nership;
and in the eighteenth century the person w ho held land as domaine utile w as
far m ore likely to be called the propriétaire than the holder o f la directe.6*
T he domaine direct consisted o f rights ow ed a seigneur by those w hose
land w as regarded as being held from that seigneur. A m odem property
ow ner’s rights are lim ited by the claim s o f the state to taxation, to em inent
domain, to the enactm ent o f criminal statutes, and to the regulation o f
inheritance, sale, and g ift B efore the Revolution, the rights o f domaine utile
w ere sim ilarly hem m ed in by the claim s o f the lord as w ell as those o f the
state. In theory there w as a relation o f personal dependence o f the proprie
tor on the lord; and, again in theory, som e expression o f this personal
dependence— an act o f "fealty and hom m age” (foi et hommage) for noble
land, the paym ent o f the cens for com m on land— was required for la directe
to be recognized.®
The w eb o f property relationships, then, was conceived as intertw ined
w ith a w eb o f personal relations am ong unequals. A w hole language o f
inequality flourished in which persons, land, and even the dependency
relationshps am ong unequals w ere distinguished by their honorable or vile
qualities. “ N oble” land might be held from a suzerain as a fief by a vassal, a
set o f relationships o f m en and land acknow ledged by fealty and hom age; a
less honorable set o f term s was used when "com m on” land w as held as a
censioe by a lord’s censitaire, a set o f relationships acknow ledged by a cash
paym ent (the cens). For som e, such distinctions rem ained fundam ental
Pothier, for exam ple, devoted the very first page o f his Treatise on Fiefs to
their exposition.6 70 Yet their force was eroding. O ne sym ptom o f the declining
9
6
8
pow er o f this conceptual schem e to grip the imagination in the eighteenth
century was the failure to maintain the full panoply o f status distinctions:
"vassal” was w idely used now in place o f “ censitaire” for the peasant with
obligations to a lord; the adjectival form o f fief (“ feudal” ) was now often
used to cover a m uch w ider range ô f seigneurial relationships. (In Chapter
Delalain, 1788), 1:175; Marcel Garaud, Histoiregénérale dudroitprivéfrançais, vol 2, La Révolution

et lapropriétéfoncière (Paris: RecueOSirey, 1958), 29-35.
68. See, for example, Renauldoo’s entries on seigneur direct and seigneur utile (Jhctiotmain des
fiefs, 2:394-95).
69. The land over which the seigneur himself exercised domaine utile was the dómame proche
which he might exploit by hiring laborers, leasing to sharecroppers or farming it out to someone.
Some of these concessions of the lord’s domaineproche tended to become permanent tenures which
were difficult to distinguish from the mouvances, the land over which the lord exercised la directe
and someone else (the vassal or the censitaire) exercised domaine utile.
70. Pothier, Traitédesfiep, 1:1.
4 w e shall try to understand the conceptual schem e o f th ose w ho w rote

Hatcahiers.)
T he ckampart71 only rarely carried the sym bolic w eight o f the cens, but
since it was assessed in kind as a portion o f the crop, its value did not
deteriorate with inflation. Its precise value varied as w idely as the nam es
under which it w as known, but it could be very burdensom e indeed,
especially when considered in conjunction with the sim ilarly assessed church
tithe.72 A lso rather com m on w ere a variety o f other cash paym ents known
as rentes seigneuriales or rentes foncières, som etim es lum ped together with
the cens as cens et rentes.73W hether or not such rentes w ere regarded, like
the cens, as recognizing the lord or as m erely a transfer o f m oney with no
im plicit acknow ledgm ent o f the dom ination o f one person over another was
(me o f those m atters over which jurists dem onstrated their intellectual
pow ers and everyone else their bafflem ent (T he legal reasoning about such
things differed in the parts o f France-under what w as called “ custom ary law”
from those under “w ritten law .”) W hatever these variously denom inated
annual paym ents evoked in the conceptual universe o f the legal theorists,
the parish cahiers show that they plainly evoked a response am ong the
country people. We see that half o f those parish cahiers that discuss the
seigneurial regim e take up these periodic dues, in contrast to a m ere one
noble cahier in seven. And let us not forget w e are speaking here only o f
those noble cahiers that take up the seigneurial regim e at all.
T he lord’s recreational privileges w ere also w eighty for the peasants;
indeed, they are the second m ost w idely discussed group o f rights.74 The
lord’s m onopoly on hunting was a double deprivation.75 N ot only w as the
71. Renauldon, Dictionnaire des fiefs, 1:95; see also the discussion in Garaud, Révolution et
propriétéfoncière, 35-38.
72. The ckampart was sometimes known as the “seigneurial tithe.” Some Burgundian villagers
caled it “the devil’s tithe” (Pierre de SaintJacob, Les paysans de la Bourgogne du Nord au dernier
siècle de FAncien Régime [Paris: Société Les Belles Lettres, I960], 120). Garaud, (Révolution et
propriété foncière, 37) suggests it could run as high as 20% of the crop. If the cens, somewhat
unusually, was assessed in kind it could rival the ckampart in its weight See Jacques Peret
Seigneurs et seigneurie en Gâtinepoitevine: La duchéde la Meiüeraye, XVIIe-XVIIIe siècles (Poitiers:
Société des Antiquaires de l’Ouest, 1976), 97-98.
73. Garaud, Révolution etpropriétéfoncière, 38. The adjectival distinction (seigneurial vs. foncier)
often, but not always, corresponded to the distinction between a recognition of lordship and a
“simple”—to use the terminology of the day—payment
74. If one considers the proportion of grievances of a particular kind, rather than the number of
documents with at least one such grievance as the measure of peasant conoem, one would actually
note that among those parish grievances that consider the seigneurial regime, rather more concern
the recreational privileges than the periodic dues (19% vs. 17%).
75. On the long identification of hunting as part of the distinctive lifestyle of a warrior class at
leisure, with the consequent unending struggle to preserve that monopoly against both needy
peasants and status-envious bourgeois, see the essays in André Chastel, ed, Le Château, la chasse
et laforêt (Bordeaux: Editions Sud-Ouest, 1990).
rural underclass deprived o f an occasional sou rce o f protein but they w ere
not free to guard their crops from animal incursions— or human incursions,
for that m atter. Apart from the dam ages o f thieves— and hungry people
passing through w ere always feared— abusive lords, hunting, m ight tram ple
fields.76 The lord’s hunting rights m ight, in turn, be lim ited by the king’s
ow n gam e preserves on which the lords dared not infringe, but such a lim it
hardly helped the country people. To make m atters w orse, under the “right
o f w arren” {droit de garenne), it m ight be the lord him self w ho w as raising
the intruding rabbits. U nder the sim ilar “ right o f d ovecote” {droit de
colombier), the lord was perm itted to raise pigeons w hose depredations
could hardly be prevented by scarecrow s. Rights to hunt or raise animals
w ere som etim es surrounded, in principle, by custom ary restrictions that, if
enforced, would significantly limit damage to peasant p roperty.77 Hunting
might be prohibited while grain was ripening, for exam ple, and w arren and
dovecote construction might be regulated. But such lim its w ere not universal
nor, even w here they w ere on the book s, w ere they universally enforced.
If the lord’s right to fish, like the right to hunt, was som etim es lim ited by
royal prerogatives (in this case the king’s claim s on navigable rivers), the
peasants w ere sim ilarly barred in principle from a sou rce o f food . Som e
tim es, the lord had the additional right to construct a fishpond, which m ight
w ell dam age the peasants’ land. This entire bundle o f recreational rights, w e
see, was far m ore w idely a subject o f peasant concern than o f the nobility.
Peasant cahiers w ere also tw o and one-half tim es m ore likely to take up
seigneurial m onopolies than w ere the cahiers o f the nobility. T h ese m onopo
lies m ost com m only included the requirem ent that grain be ground at the
lord’s mill (banalité du moulin), that the lord 's oven be used for baking
{banalité dufour), or that the lord’s w inepress be used {banalité dupressoir).
The lord m ight have the right to fix a date prior to which w ine could not be
sold {banvin), grapes picked {ban de vendange), crops harvested {ban de
moisson), or m owing carried out {ban de fauchaison). B y jum ping the gun,
so to speak, the lord for a few decisive days could have a local m onopoly on
m arketing. Examining other classes o f grievances that constituted burdens
borne by the peasants reveals the sam e pattern: the parish cahiers are tw ice
as likely as the noble docum ents to discuss com pulsory labor services on
the lord’s lands and three tim es as likely to take up any o f the variety o f
paym ents due the lord when property changed hands. In short, the dem ands
m ost characteristic o f the peasant cahiers deal with the m aterial costs
76. A collateral right might be joined to the lords’ monopolies on hunting and weapons, a
monopoly on hunting dogs. On occasion, lords chasing game across peasant plots would kdl the
dogs they came across, thereby eliminating any nearby rivals to their own canine servitors (and
depriving the nearby peasants of a valuable guard, herder and, perhaps, companion). See Renauldon,
Dictionnaire desfiefs, 1:205-6; Garaud, Révolution etpropriétéfoncière, 93.
77. See Renauldon, Dictionnaire desfiefs, 1:223-26, 513-17.
im posed on them by seigneurial privilege; these areas are far less frequently
taken up by the nobility.
Nobility: Honor
What d oes the nobility want on the public agenda? If half the parish cahiers
that take up the seigneurial regim e regard periodic dues as w orth discussing,
w e also find that half the noble cahiers take up claim s to sym bolic deferen ce.
T h ese are rights that perm it som e distinguishing behavior or dress for the
seigneur78 that is denied to others. This would include the right to bear
arm s,79 which constituted for the nobility an outward rem inder o f their place
in that substratum o f Indo-European social m ythology that saw the w orld
divided into those w ho prayed, those who fought, and those w ho w orked.80
Sym bolic deference patterns included other “ honorific rights” that could
not be sold, rented, exchanged, or given to som eone else, for exam ple,
rights to precedence in public processions or in seating arrangem ents at
Sunday church services. The latter was the m ost noticeable portion o f an
entire lord-church nexus.81 The lord’s ancestors m ight be buried below
the church; his m arriage, procreation, death especially m arked; his place
particularly notable in the endless cerem onial observances o f the liturgical
year. In a few places, he might have a traditional claim on naming the
p rie st82 N oble lords also had som ething m ore than a house: the château
might be decorated with a family coat-of-arm s, a weathervane— was this a
claim to rights over air to m atch those over land and w ater?83— and
architectural them es o f a distinctly m ilitary ca s t A lord with rights o f high
ju stice could have a gallow s.
This category o f sym bolization, the category o f m ost pertinence to the
78. We indude here several rights that some eighteenth-century jurists held to be privileges of
the noble rather than of the seigneur. The distinction is not always dear, nor do we have a sense
that it was always clearly recognized by those who wrote the cahiers (on which more below).
79. The history of the interdictionon weapons is tittle researched. The essay of Christian Desplat
stands out: “Le Peuple en armes dans les Pyrénées occidentales françaises à l’époque moderne,” in
Jean Nicolas, ed., Mouvements populaires et conscience sociale, XVI-XIXe siicles (Paris: Maloine,
1985), 217-27.
80. Georges Duby, The Three Orders: Feudal Society Imagined (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1980).
81. The variety of ways the lord might be linked through the church to the sacred can be seen
by leafing through Renauldon’s manual. Renauldon, indeed, informs us that “honorific rights" has as
its core meaning precisely the halo of religious ceremonial surrounding the lord (Dictionnaire des
fiefs. 1:346).
82. For some Alsatian examples, see Erich Pelzer, “Nobles, paysans et la fin de la féodalité en
Alsace,” in La Révolution française et le monde rural (Paris: Editions du Comité des Itavaux
Historiques et Scientifiques, 1989), 50-51.
83. The lord claimed rights that no peasant had over denizens of earth, water, and air in the
huntingrights and the rights to rabbits, fish, and pigeons.
nobility, is o f relatively little concern to the peasantry. W hile 48% o f all the
nobles’ grievances concerning the seigneurial regim e fall in this group,
making it the m ost num erous o f the 19 categories in Table 2 .4 , for the
peasants a scant 11% o f all grievances are (Hi such subjects and it is their
12th m ost w idely grieved about class o f dem ands. It is m oreover, the only
class o f seigneurial subjects taken up by a higher proportion o f noble
docum ents than by those o f the Third E state. In an era o f royal arm ies and
royal courts, lords had not raised feudal levies nor tried capital offen ses for
a long tim e. Ib rrets and gallow s alike w ere no longer m aterial im plem ents
o f seigneurial pow er; yet they w ere so plainly meaningful to the nobility that
one balks at describing them as m ere decoration. To look ahead to Chapter
8 (see p. 463), the pain expressed by noble deputies on the suppression o f
such sym bolizations, rivals any other single expression o f dism ay at the
cou rse o f the R evolution.)
Such dram atic m arkers o f status might have other m eanings as weflL
C onsider the barring o f m ost Frenchm en from the display o f arm s. An
enforced m onopoly o f arm s prom oted a disarm ed rural underclass, a m atter
o f royal concern since the great peasant risings o f the seventeenth century.84
D espite the prohibition and searches, a taste for firearm s had insinuated
itself into m asculine popular culture, as R oger Dupuy observes, a taste that
revealed itself in shooting com petitions at village fairs or firing o f m uskets
at w eddings.85 N onetheless, the ostentious bearing o f arm s w as not very
salient to the peasantry, as indicated by the relatively low interest o f the
peasants in this issue. But a disarm ed peasantry could not defend their
crops against wild animals, let alone the lord’s rabbits. If w e glance ahead at
Table 2 .5, w e see that in the parishes, it was far m ore im portant to have
hunting rights discussed than the right to bear arm s: The peasants w anted
to kill crop-m enacing birds and animals and they wanted a little m ore m eat;
they had no great interest in show ing o ff their w eapons. For the nobles, on
the contrary, it is the status m arker that is m ore com m only on the agenda.
Hunting m attered a good deal to the peasants, but the right to walk around
with a sw ord did n o t O r, m ore precisely, the peasantry w ere con cern ed
with food and with crops, but not with d ie honor involved in the right to
bear arm s, if conceived o f separately from the burden o f the recreational
privileges. For the nobility, the priority o f concerns was reversed.
84. The high rate of military desertion assured the continual availability of arms, even though
confiscation was one of the major tasks of France's militarized national police, the maréchausée. The
need of the cultivators to protect their crops, of the impoverished for meat, of minor officials for
protection against a potentially dangerous populace, of bourgeois for self-respect inemulation of the
nobility, combined to make the intermittent disarmament campaigns a continual focus of contestation
and rebellion. See Iain A. Cameron, Crime and Repression in the Auvergne and the Guyenne,
1720-1790 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 79-88, 224-26.
85. See Roger Dupuy, La Garde Nationale et les débuts de la Révolution en IUe-et-Vilaine
(1789-mai 1793) (Rennes: Université de Haute-Bretagne, 1972), 28.
O ne sort o f status m arker the nobles did not address, how ever, w as
ritualized humiliation. To the lim ited extent that the nobles could be said to
have been keen to discuss anything connected with the seigneurial regim e,
it w as their claim s to a positive public display o f their superiority. O ccasion
ally, lords held the right to a negative display: to com pel a humiliating a c t
The Third E state o f Lannion speaks o f "practices degrading to hum anity,”
including the lord’s right to com pel singing in public or jum ping in the w ater
on which they com m ent: “ no lord can oppose the abolition o f such rights
unless he finds honor in humiliating his fellow s” (A P 4 :7 6 ). D iscussions o f
such humiliating practices, including the right to get villagers to chase frogs
away or the lord’s right to put his foot in his peasants’ m arriage bed
(“frogging” and “ thighing” ) ,86 are rare for the parishes and the Third E state;
they are nonexistent cm the part o f the nobility. To be sure, the m ere denial
to som e o f what is granted to others may be experienced as humiliating,
regardless o f the particular acts that are perm itted/forbidden. N ot far from
the assem bly o f Lannion, w hose sense o f humiliation w e ju st exam ined, the
assem bly o f the Third E state o f Auray dem ands the suppression o f “ u seless”
and “ ridiculous” rights that are leftovers o f “ centuries o f fury and blindness”
in which “ the hard and am bitious man made him self vile while degrading his
fellow s.” T hey are not speaking o f “frogging” or “ thighing,” but o f the rights
to raise rabbits and hunt (4 P 6:115). If, for som e in the Third E state, not
being allow ed to do what was allow ed another, was a humiliation, the other
side o f that particular coin was that for som e noble assem blies, an expansive
sen se o f honor included virtually the entire seigneurial regim e, including
som e very lucrative rights (see Chapter 3, p. 80).
T h ose w ho dealt with the seigneurs in the Old Regim e understood the
intensity o f concern for the form s and form alities o f public recognition. T he
law yer Renaukkm used the introduction to a manual o f seigneurial rights to
boast o f the particular distinction o f his book in the area o f sym bolic
prerogatives. A p redecessor in the w riting o f such manuals, he inform s his
prospective readers, correctly noted that the honorific rights w ere those
m ost jealously guarded by the seigneurs. The earlier manual, how ever,
m anaged to om it many, a fault Renauldon prom ises to rem edy.87 But even
Renaukkm is cursory on rights w hose sole purpose is hum iliation.88
86. Garaud, Révolution etpropriétéfoncière, 102-9.

87. Renauldon, Dictionnaire desfiefs, l:üi. Note that this eighteenth-century equivalent of today’s
book-jacket puffery is addressed to the seigneurs themselves, a part of the work’s intended
audience. (The title page describes the book as a “most useful and suitable work for al seigneurs,
judges, and lawyers.”)
88. Out of alphabetical sequence, as if it is an afterthought, there is a brief discussion of "rights
that are abusive, ridiculous, and contrary to good morals” (Renauldon, Dictionnaire des fiefs,
1:357-58). It is interesting that a manual for lords and their advisers had such a category at alL Is
this anattempt to disown some daims to save the rest in the threatening dimate of 1788, when this
dictionary appeared? If so, this may be a forerunner of the renunciations of August 4,1789.
We see here a system that at the top is thought o f in largely but hardly
exclusively sym bolic term s, but at the bottom seem s rather exclusively a
system o f m aterial exactions. O r, m ore precisely, the nobles’ public tran
script stresses the sym bols by which their distinctiveness is to be recog
nized. Theirs is a discourse o f honor.
Third Estate: Freedom of the Market

If the seigneurial regim e’s burdens are the peasant’s concerns and its
honorific distinctions a uniquely striking part o f the nobility’s, what is m ost
distinctive to the Third Estate is different yet again. Returning to Table 2 .4 ,
w e see first o f all a consequence o f the vastly larger num ber o f dem ands a
typical Third E state text has than either o f the other tw o groups.89 Seven
teen o f the nineteen categories o f grievance are m ost w idely discussed in
the Third E state cahiers.
We note that those burdens that the peasants treated far m ore frequently
than the nobility are even m ore w idely discussed by the Third E state:
seigneurial m onopolies, com pulsory labor services, periodic dues, dues on
property transfers, and recreational privileges. W hen w e exam ined the m ost
com m on grievances earlier, w e saw that the Third E state was especially
concerned with restrictions on the m arket (see p. 35). That conclusion is
reaffirm ed by Table 2 .4 . Seigneurial m onopolies, taken up by four Third
E state cahiers in five, are taken up less than half so w idely in the parish
docum ents; the sam e holds for the labor services. Although a higher
proportion o f the cahiers o f all three groups deal with periodic dues than
with dues on property transfers, the latter occu rs in alm ost tw ice as many
Third E state cahiers than parish docum ents, as contrasted with far less o f a
difference in the form er. (P roperty transfer dues inhibited free com m erce
in land.) In short, o f those categories particularly characteristic o f the
peasantry, Third E state concern leans tow ard those aspects o f the seigneur
ial regim e that have particularly dampening effect on trade.
The seigneurial corvées, the com pulsory labor services, w ere no doubt far
less onerous in the eighteenth century than in past centuries, having been
partially supplanted by the king’s increasing capacity to extract such ser
vices, m ost im portantly for w ork on the royal roads. But the lord’s claim to
unpaid labor in his fields, perhaps including the peasant’s draft animals, and
occasionally including claim s to artisanal services or even labor on his
château, w ere still quite w idespread and felt to be onerous enough.90
89. The median number of demands (seigneurial and otherwise) in Third Estate cahiers is 203;
in noble cahiers, 141; and in parish cahiers, 33 (for means see Table 2.3).
90. Garaud, Révolution et propriété foncière, 51-56. The corvées were also sometimes important
enough for the lords to use their judicial resources to insist on their collection, at least in the region
around St Jean d'Angély studied by Anthony Crubaugh in research not yet published.
The seigneurial m onopolies, o f cou rse, radically curtailed com petition for
the provision o f essential serv ices.91 B y charging the m iller, say, a high fee
for the exclusive right to do the local milling and then com pelling the nearby
peasants, backed by the w eight o f French law, to use the m iller’s services,
the costs o f agricultural production w ere kept high. The milling m onopoly,
indeed, not only prevented m illers and peasants from associating freely, but
it prevented the construction o f new m ills that might com pete w ith the
lord 's. In this sen se the m iller may be said to have paid the lord at a high
rate in return for secu rity.92
Examining other classes o f grievance that are not m ajor peasant concerns
but that the Third E state focu ses on, w e see a rather similar pattem .
Seigneurial tolls w ere an often lucrative source o f seigneurial revenue that
had been opposed on and o ff over the centuries by the central governm ent
If the short-term interests o f the royal fisc favored the m aintenance o f at
least the royal tolls— the king, after all, was the first seigneur o f the
land— since C olbert in the seventeenth century the cam paign for abolition
had been particularly lively.93 The struggle for national integration and
econom ic developm ent had made the eradication o f internal barriers to
com m erce a central m ercantilist concern, one point on which the new er
doctrines o f their intellectual enem ies, the physiocrats, w ere in agreem en t94
The tolls are not notable am ong parish grievances, while they are a relatively
com m on subject for the nobility. But they are treated in tw ice as many
cahiers o f the Third E state. On the general them e, w e note that the subject
o f rights over fairs and m arkets95 is not a com m on one. But Table 2 .4 show s
that concern over such rights was far m ore w idespread am ong the Third
E state than am ong the nobility and rather unusual am ong the peasantry.
Serfdom , as it still existed in a few regions in the eighteenth century,96
was largely reduced to mainmorte, w hereby a serf could bequeath his land
91. Here is the Third Estate of Alençon: "Let all monopoly rights—on mOb, ovens, winepresses
and others—be irrevocably abolished as contrary to natural liberty. In consequence, the commerce
inflour 8haDbe made free throughout the realm, free of alldues andextricated from allimpediments”
(AP 1:718.)
92. The revolutionary end of the banalités brought to a dose the lord's capacity to squeeze the
ndfer, yet we find the millers of Hainaut in 1790 protesting the new legislation: in the new legal
environment many new mills were rapidly constructed (Lefebvre, Paysans du Nord, 377).
93. J. F. Bosher, The Single Duty Project: A Study ofthe Movementfor a French Customs Union
m theEighteenth Century (London: Athkme, 1964).
94. Eli F. Heckscher, Mercantilism (New York: Macmillan, 1955), 1:78-109; Weulersse, Mouve
mentphysiocratigue, 1:510-14.
95. Seigneurs sometimes had the exclusive right to institute and administer fairs or markets in
their localities or to collect a variety of fees there.
96. Marcel Garaud, Histoiregénérale du droitprivéfrançais, voL 1, La Révolution et régalité civile
(Paris: Recueil Sirey, 1953), 15-34; Charles-Louis Chassin, L'Eglise et les derniers serfs (Paris:
Dentu, 1880).
only to a child living at hom e, in the absence o f whom the land reverted to
the seigneur. This necessarily im plied that the peasant mainmortable could
not sell the land and therefore could leave the com m unity only by sacrificing
his birthright This institution was a clear barrier to free m obility o f labor
and free com m erce in land. Although fairly uncom m on outside o f Franche-
Com té and Burgundy, serfdom w as dram atically quite striking: what other
aspect o f the seigneurial regim e was m ore rem iniscent o f the m edieval
past?97 Yet it did not inspire much com m ent am ong the nobles or peasants
o f m ost bailliages; only the Third E state show s much in terest
Second only to m onopolies in how w idespread was Third E state concern ,
the recreational privileges had at least an elem ent o f hindrance o f enterprise.
The ban on hunting reduced the capacity o f peasants to provide them selves
with protein. T he w hole array o f rights barred large proprietors w ithout the
particular privilege needed from raising their ow n pigeons, say, perhaps in
an effort to develop a luxury m arket
If the peasants seem alm ost exclusively concerned w ith their burdens,
and the nobility are quite distinctively interested in their claim s to prestige
(although hardly to the exclusion o f other con cern s), the Third E state’s
focu s on m arket barriers is less clea r-cu t Alm ost half their docum ents take
up the seigneurial regim e as a w hole;98 alm ost tw o-thirds take up the
seigneurial courts, both o f which plainly have to do with m uch besides
barriers to enterprise. Indeed the very diversity o f Third E state concern s
is reflected in the large size o f the “ other” category. H alf o f the Third
Estate docum ents have at least one demand that fits none o f our seigneurial
categories, as contrasted with one-fifth o f the other docum ents.
We may com plete our survey o f Table 2 .4 by briefly exam ining the less
com m on subjects o f grievance. “ Seigneurial aspects o f land tenure” refers
to rather abstractly conceived issues o f rights fram ed in the archaic and
arcane legal categories o f the Old Regim e. D istinctions betw een fiefs and
censives, the status o f alleux (allodial land or freeholds) and the com plexities
o f empkytéose seem not to have been terribly com m on, and far less com m on
for the peasants than anyone e lse .99 Uncom m on as they w ere, such m atters
97. The Third Estate of Poitiers: “If, for many centuries, France languished in ignorance,
anarchy and confusion, those were the centuries of the feudal regime, when the seigneurs, enjoying
their usurped authority, crushed goods and persons alike under anequal servitude. The odious time
of personal servitude has at last disappeared; or, if in some parts of the realm, the right of
mainmorte still exercises its empire, this right. . . can not fad to disappear soon in its turn”
(AP 5:412).
98. Grievances that address the seigneurial ritfits as acoiectivity rather thanrestrict themselves
to particular rights are coded by us under the headingof “Seigneurial Regime in General." If a cahier
contains such grievances and also contains demands about particular rights, both are coded.
99. Looking ahead, one notes that the parish cahiers were showing very little interest in just
those sorts of distinctions that would be so important in revolutionary legislation (see Chapters 8
and9).
w ere for the nobility m ore com m only discussed than many other things.
T here is even less interest in the various institutions that to the legal-
m inded signified a vassal’s acknowledgm ent o f his lord or in the lord’s
occasional attem pted exercise o f his prerogative to seize tem porarily the
land o f one who withheld such acknow ledgm ent100 For the peasants these
practices appear utterly insignificant
L et us consider now the seigneurial aspects o f “communal rights.” Rural
com m unities’ claim s o f collective rights o f various kinds had largely defeated
the sporadic attem pts o f the central authorities to prom ote what M arc B loch
referred to as agrarian individualism .101 T h ese rights included obligatory
fallow land; bans on close-cutting agricultural tools; claim s to access o f
communal animals to postharvest stubble, to fallow , to com munally ow ned
land; and various rights to forest products. T h ese rights w ere articulated
with the rights o f the lord and w ere som etim es the occasion o f com peting
claim s on w oods, pastures, harvests.’ W hile raised as an issue by only one
parish cahier in ten and in rather m ore Third E state docum ents, w e see, in
contrast, that the nobles avoided this area alm ost com pletely (o r w ere they
m erely indifferent?).
The various legal specialists, ren t-collectors, and stew ards w ho served
the seigneurs and m ediated the lord-peasant relationship, seem to have held
little interest for either nobles or peasants, for all their significance in the
operation o f the system .102 T he role o f the feudistes, authorities on seigneur
ial law w ho advised the lords on maximizing their exactions from the
peasantry, has been the subject o f m uch com m ent in the historical litera
tu re;103 the m ini-technocrats o f estate management have been m uch less
discu ssed.104 But it may be a bit surprising to see that in 1789 only
100. The rights I have inmind here indudefoi et hommage, aveu et dénombrement, commue, and
saisie, on aDof which see Garaud, Révolution et propriétéfoncière, 17-29. On land other than fiefs,
recognition of the seigneur’s daims was taken to go with payment of cens, champart, or rente
seigneuriale, which we have examined under the category of "periodic payments.”
101. Marc Bloch, "La Lutte pour l'individualisme agraire dans la France du XVIDe siècle,’’
Asmales ¿Histoire Economique etSociale 2 (1930): 329-83; 511-84.
102. The other aspects of the seigneurial regime that the tables show to have been of little
weight in 1789 were the "protection rights," a variety of now unusual dues paid in the Middle Ages
in return for the lord’s military protection (taille seigneuriale, cens en commande, le guet et la garde)
and various equally archaic daims of the lord to being lodged or fed (gîte, prise).
103. See, for example, SaintJacob, Paysans de la Bourgogne du Nord, 432-34; Jean Bastier, La
féodalité ausiècle des lumières dans la région de Tbulouse(1730-1790) (Paris: BibliothèqueNationale,
1975), 64-71.
104. Robert Forster, “Seigneurs and Their Agents,” in Ernst Hinrichs, Eberhard Schnitt, and
Rudolf F. Vierhaus, eds., Vom Ancien Régime zur Französischen Revolution: Forschungen und
Perspektiven (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1978), 169-87; "The ‘World’ Between Seigneur
and Peasant,” in Ronald C. Rosbottom, ed., Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture (Madison:
University of Wisconsin Press, 1976), 5:401-21.
the cahiers o f the Third E state seem to have paid any o f th ese figures
much attention.105
T h ese agents have often been seen as deeply im plicated in a rationalization
o f the seigneurie that destroyed w hatever responsible paternalism may have
at som e point existed and stepped up the exactions on the peasantry as
w ell. Saint Jacob sees the renters o f seigneurial rights, the fermiers, as w ell
on their w ay to becom ing the real bosses o f the estates in northern
Burgundy.106 Pierre G oubert, in the cou rse o f an astute com m entary on the
unresolved question o f w hether there was a radical increase in the lords’
efforts to collect dues as the Old Regim e approached its end, suggests that
w hatever reality there may have been to this phenom enon, a dram atic
system atization o f estate managem ent in the eighteenth century w as cen
tral. 107 R obert F orster finds, in the papers o f the seigneurial agents, evidence
o f a w orld com ing apart, evidence o f a seigneur w hose distance from the
peasants is m ore than spatial and w hose local agents take without giving.108
In this light A lfred Cobban’s claim that the cahiers are full o f com plaints
about the “ ex cesses o f seigneurial agents“ 109 is unsurprising. What is a lût
startling is that, as far as the peasants are concerned, Cobban is m istaken:
the peasants have little to say.110 That the nobility also seem oblivious is
only less startling in light o f their capacity to avoid discussing many other
facets o f the seigneurial regim e.
Seigneurial Rights in the Cahiers: Peasant

Burdens, Third Estate Market Freedom,
Noble Silence and Honor
We have explored in som e detail the differences am ong our three groups o f
docum ents in stressing specific aspects o f the seigneurial regim e. L et us
105. It is conceivable that some of the grievances directed against the lord's agents merely name
that agent as a renter of land (fermier), particularly in northern France where such renters often
also functioned as estate-managers. To the extent that the agent is named by villagers in this
fashion, the counts presented here would be undercounts. (I owe this observation to Cynthia
Bouton.) The presence of such agents at parish assemblies might have deterred otherwise open
criticism on occasion, but peasants who were often undeterred from criticizing seigneurial justice by
the presiding seigneurial judge prescribed in the royal regulations, would hardly have been
intimidated into nearly total silence by accountants and rent-collectors.
106. Saint Jacob, Paysans de la Bourgogne duNord, 428-32.
107. Pierre Goubert, “Sociétés rurales françaises du XVIIIe siècle: Vingt paysanneries contras
tées. Quelques problèmes," in his Clio parmi les hommes: Recueuü darticles (Paris: Mouton,
1976), 70.
108. Forster, “The 'World’ Between Seigneur and Peasant,’’ 418.
109. Cobban, Social Interpretation, 48. On Cobban's misreadings of the cahiers, see Chapter 10.
110. On the significance of peasant lack of concern with the lord's agents, see Chapter 5.
now , m ore briefly, approach the sam e com parisons in another w ay, by
com paring the relative frequencies with which each group takes up particular
seigneurial rights, the sam e sort o f data that was used in Table 2 .1 , but now
exclusively focusing on the seigneurial regim e. G oing through all our cod e
categories, let us select the dozen m ost com m only discussed seigneurial
m atters for each o f the three groups. Table 2 .5 lists them in their order o f
salience to the parishes. For each right w e indicate its rank am ong all
subjects including those that are not aspects o f the seigneurial regim e. The
seigneurial institution m ost w idely discussed by the parishes, for exam ple,
is the lord’s right to raise pigeons; this right is 39th am ong all subjects
com plained about by the Third E state.
Ifcble 2 .5 . Frequencies1with Which Documents TYeat Often-Discussed Seigneurial

Subjects
Subject Parishes Third Estate Nobility
Right to raise pigeons {droit de colombier) 14* 39* 399*

Seigneurial courts in general 25* 52* 174*
Seigneurial regime in general 27* 48.5* 125.5*
Right to hunt {droit de chassé) 29* 27* 174*
Use o f seigneur's mill is compulsory
(banalité du moulin) 34* 87.5* 689
A periodic cash payment (cens et rentes) 45* 264.5 836.5
Dues on property transfers (tods et ventes) 50* 175 582.5
Compulsory labor services {corvées) 51* 24* 380.5*
Seigneurial monopolies in general
{banalités) 52* 31* 338.5*
Periodic dues in general 55* 329 633.5
Periodic dues in kind {champarf) 58* 120.5* 470
Seigneurial tolls 78* 17.5* 98.5*
Miscellaneous aspects o f seigneurial courts 88 140* 303.5*
Miscellaneous aspects o f seigneurial
regime 105 70.5* 260.5*
Right to bear arms 131 233.5 148.5*
Use o f seigneur’s oven for baking is
compulsory {banalité du four) 156 167.5* 753
Honorific rights 511 713.5 246.5*
Symbolic deference patterns in general 548.5 652.5 174*
Median rank o f 12 most widely grieved-

about seigneurial topics 47.5 50.25 210
*VWues other than integers indicate tied ranks. For example, grievances concerning "seigneurial
tok” occur in the same number of Third Estate cahiers as grievances concerning the noble right to
trial in a high court (see Table 2.1), which is not a seigneurial right Among subjects treated inThird
Estate cahiers, these two subjects are tied as the seventeenth andeighteenth most common; hence
a rank for "seigneurial tolls" of 17.5.
*Indicates that a subject is among the dozen most frequently treated in the cahiers of the parishes,
Third Estate, or nobility.
The relative silence o f the nobility on the seigneurial regim e stands out
« ic e again. M ost o f the rights item ized in Table 2 .5 are far less salient for
the nobles than the others. T here is only one aspect o f the seigneurial
regim e am ong the nobles’ hundred m ost w idely discussed subjects. This
may be contrasted with 13 for the parishes and 9 for the Third E state. T he
peasants may have w idely protested pigeon-raising; the nobility finds 398
subjects m ore w orthy o f attention. The median rank am ong the dozen
seigneurial institutions m ost com m only discussed by the nobility is an
unim pressive 210. The nobles appear far away from the concern s o f the
peasants or the urban notables.
Table 2 .5 not only reinforces the picture o f a nobility keeping its ow n
counsel, but also dem onstrates that when the nobility d oes discuss the
seigneurial regim e, its agenda is distinctive. C onsider again the right to bear
arms and the intim ately associated right to hunt, clearly distinguished in this
table. T he com plex o f a hunting-arms m onopoly has a m aterial com ponent
in the form o f crop damage and loss o f m eat, a sym bolic-identity com ponent
as the m aintenance o f an especially pow erful status m arker and a political
com ponent as a guarantor o f the m ilitary superiority o f the pow erful. That
the peasants are far m ore prone to single out the hunting aspect, rather
than the arms aspect, for discussion argues that it is their econom ic situa
tion that is their paramount concern. For the nobility, the discrepancy
betw een the tw o rankings is far less, with the right to bear arm s enjoying
pride o f place. This suggests the degree to which these institutions w ere
seen by the nobles through the prism o f their concerns for public tokens o f
resp ect. And it also perm its one to w onder about the degree to which the
language o f honor functions as a form o f publicly expressible speech that
conceals other concerns. It is possible that the nobles had political w orries
as w ell as threatened pride in mind: B y M arch 1789 perhaps som e o f the
nobles could see in the storm around them those greater storm s yet to
com e and looked to reaffirm a disarm ed countryside. A s for the Third
E state, the discrepancy in ranking is o f the sam e sort as for the rural
parishes, although far m ore extrem e. But one could not conclude that the
sym bolic issu es, for the urban notables, pale in significance before the
econom ic on es. For a large num ber o f rural people hunting could spell the
difference betw een a m easure o f security in poverty and utter destitution.111
But for how many o f the upper Third Estate w as hunting significant for
adding a bit o f m eat to one’s table and for how many was the issue the
enjoym ent o f the lord’s forbidden pleasures? (Perhaps an upper-village
stratum m ight have had a similar view p oin t)
111. On the makeshift economy by which large numbers of people managed to keep themselves
barely above total ruin, see Olwen H. Hufton, The Poor ofEighteenth-Century France: 1750-1789
(Oxford; Clarendon Press, 1974).
W hen w e turn to the financial burdens o f the seigneurial regim e, so

im portant to the peasantry, the gap betw een the French nobility and the
people o f the French countryside appears even greater. The com pulsory
use o f the lord’s m ill, the various annual paym ents (cens et rentes, champart),
the very high mutation fee exacted when property changed hands (lods et
ventes), the various m onopolies considered as a group, the ensem ble o f
periodic dues— all figure im portantly in the parish cahiers, though astonish
ingly little is said o f them by the nobles.
liie r e are, indeed, only tw o categories in this table that are actually m ore
salient for the nobility for either o f the other tw o groups: "honorific rights”
and “ sym bolic deference patterns in gen era l” 112 The peasants as w ell
as the urban notables have about as little tim e to pay attention to the
appropriateness o f particular form s o f dress on cerem onial occasion s, the
occupancy o f particular pew s in church, the proper sequence o f m arch in
parades or the form ulas w ith which people greeted one another as the
nobles had to consider the financial burdens on rural France; but th ese are
the m ost discussion-w orthy m atters to the system ’s ch ief beneficiaries.
If the peasants are not quite so indifferent to these public em blem s o f
differential honor as is the TTiird E state (and w e may group the right to bear
arm s here as w ell) they hardly loom as m ajor peasant concerns. This may
surprise som e. T here is w ell-attested evidence o f peasant attack, in the
risings o f 1789 and beyond (see Chapter 5, p. 223), on the sym bolic
trappings o f the seigneurial regim e. W eathervanes w ere destroyed, gallow s
and pillories burned, the lords’ church benches ripped out, coats-of-arm s
sm ashed, and rural France inaugurated and sustained its ow n countersym
bolism o f liberty in the erection s o f m aypoles in front o f the châteaux. 113 In
this discrepancy betw een the reticen ce o f the cahiers and the vigorous
actions soon to follow , w e catch another glim pse o f a them e w e shall be
pursuing further. The peasant cahiers are not the frozen em bodim ent o f
eighteenth-century opinion on seigneurial rights; they are an expression o f
the positions held at a particular m om ent in the eighteenth century. T h ese
positions evolved along with the Revolution they helped inaugurate, evolved
rapidly, in fa ct The indifference to the sym bolic dim ension o f the seigneurial
112. Just as “seigneurial rights in general” refers to grievances that focus on seigneurial rights
as a collectivity, “symbolic deference patterns in general” includes demands addressed to a range
of such signs of deference conceived of as a group. Similarly, “seigneurial monopolies in general”
will refer to attacks on (or defenses of) banalités as a group; etc. To reiterate, the very same
cahiers that speak of a dass of seigneurial institutions may also speak of particular instances. If so,
both the general and the particular grievances are coded and counted.
113. For some examples, see Sydney Herbert, The Fall of Feudalism m France (New Hbrlc
Barnes and Noble, 1921), 124-27, 161-62, 165-71; Mona Ozouf, La Fite révolutionnaire, 1789-
1799 (Paris: Gallimard, 1976), 281-316; Alphonse Autant, La Révolutionfrançaise et le régimeféodal
(Paris: Félix Alcan, 1919), 129,142,167-68.
regim e that w e have seen, for exam ple, is m irrored in a rather low level o f
attacks on coats-of-arm s, w eathervanes, or turrets early in the Revolution.
The ch oice o f such sym bolic targets, how ever, rose by the sum m er and fall
o f 1789 and was quite substantial by the w inter rising o f 1 78 9-90 (see
Chapter 8, p. 499).
A s for the Third E state, w e may note the subjects m ore salient to them
than to the others: the right to hunt, the com pulsory labor services, the
seigneurial m onopolies in general and the seigneurial tolls.114 Apart from
the right to hunt, these are clearly interferences with the operation o f the
m arket The right to hunt probably taps into the particular Third E state
concern with privilege. W hy ought landholding com m oners not be able to
hunt, w hether they are lords or not? Just such resentm ent may have
fueled a grow ing propensity for the lords’ zealous defen se o f their hunting
m onopolies to set them at odds not ju st with plebeian poachers but with
status-conscious bourgeois landow ners out to dem onstrate that they liked a
good hunt as m uch as the style-setting aristocrats.115
We began this chapter by trying to identify the distinctive traits o f each
group’s agenda by considering grievances on all subjects. We found distinc
tive em phases: burdens, the m arket and privilege, state expansion, and
personal liberties. W hen w e look at the m ore specific agendas for the
seigneurial regim e, the m ore general parish and Third E state patterns hold
up within the m ore specific seigneurial arena as welL For the nobles what
was striking when w e exam ined their agenda as a w hole w as a general
avoidance o f seigneurial m atters altogether; when w e look at those seigneur
ial m atters that are discussed w e found that those m atters that touch on
their honor w ere the ones m ore likely to be brought forw ard. The picture
w e have been assem bling has largely (although not exclusively) been drawn
from the study o f the m ore com m on item s on the various agendas. M ight it
be the case that these patterns only obtain for the m ost w idely discussed
seigneurial m atters? To answ er this question, w e exam ined the relative
salience, for the three groups, o f a much larger range o f seigneurial subjects.
T he results are sum marized in Table 2 .6 .116
The dominant pattern here is quite plain: half o f the aspects o f the
seigneurial regim e our cod e distinguishes are discussed m ost w idely, com
pared to other institutions, in the parish cahiers and least in the cahiers o f
the nobility. This is what one might w ell exp ect on the basis o f the foregoing
114. “Miscellaneous aspects of the seigneurial regime” also belongs on this list We see here
again the greater range of Third Estate concerns, great enough to strain at the limits of our coding.
115. Anne-Marie Cocula-Vaillières, “La contestation des privilèges seigneuriaux dans le fonds
des Eaux et Forêts. L’exemple acquitain dans la seconde moitié du XVIIIe siècle,” inJean Nicolas,
ed., Mouvementspopulaires et conscience sociale, XVI-XIXe siècles (Paris: Maloine, 1985), 214.
116. We omitted subjects that were not treated in at least 5% of the documents of at least one
group to avoid extremely rare institutions on which our frequencies would be highly unstable.
S eigneurial R ights cm the R evolutionary Agenda 59
Ik b le 2 .6 . Relative Frequencies with Which Sei&ieurial

Subjects Are Treated by Parishes, Third Estate, and Nobility
Number o f
Seigneurial Subjects
Relative Frequency* (N = 47)
P> T > N 27
P = T> N 1
T >P >N 10
P> N > T 5
T> N > P 1
N> P> T 2
N> T > P 1
Note: Seigneurial subjects in this analysis were those in which at least

one class of documents (P, T, N) had at least one grievance on the
subject in at least 5% of its cahiers.
•For each subject, the rank of that subject is examined for the parishes,
Third Estate, and nobility; the parishes, Third Estate, and nobility in
turn are ordered according to which has the highest, lowest, and
intermediate ranking for that subject For example, consider the droit de
colombier, the right to raise pigeons. For the parishes this ranks 14 in
terms of the number of cahiers treating it for the Third Estate 39 and
for the nobility 399. This subject then is one of the 27 assigned to the
modal pattem, P > T > N.
discussion. Clearly, how ever, there are seigneurial institutions that are
exceptions to the rule o f great parish interest, little noble interest, and
interm ediary levels for the Third E state. Taking the m odal pattern as the
standard, it may be o f interest to exam ine tw o sorts o f deviations: (1 ) those
institutions for which the nobility is not the least interested o f the three and
(2 ) those for which the Third Estate is m ore concerned than the parishes.
T he first group, those that receive atypically large noble attention, are
enum erated in Table 2 .7. W ith the exception o f the last item , the rentes
foncières, these are all m atters w hose sym bolic significance is far clearer
than their m aterial im port In addition to the arenas o f sym bolic deference
already discussed, our broader survey now turns up a variety o f aspects o f
fief-holding that in the eighteenth century contributed far m ore to the lords’
m ystique than to their pocketbooks, now that vassals no longer ow ed
m ilitary service to their suzerains. The very notion o f a fief attracted little
attention in the cahiers. B y the late eighteenth century, fiefs w ithout
obligations w ere not always easy to distinguish from freeholds and fiefs
carrying obligations in cash or kind w ere not always easy to distinguish from
censives, a point acknow ledged at the very beginning o f H ervé’s seven-
volum e Theory of Feudal Matters, one o f the last treatises on feudal law to
appear before the R evolution.117
117. François Hervé, Théorie des matièresféodales et censuelles (Paris: Knapen, 1785-88), 1:1
et seq.
Tàble 2 .7 . Seigneurial Subjects o f Relatively Greater Salience to the Nobility than to

the Parishes, Third Estate, or Both
L Nobles more concerned than both parishes and Third Estate

• Symbolic deference patterns in general
• Honorific rights
• Fealty and homage (foi et hommage) (vassal’s acknowledgment o f receipt o f a
fief and o f his responsibilities to his lord)
II. Nobles more concerned than Third Estate
• Right to bear arms
• Avowal and enumeration (aveu et dénombrement) (a detailed description o f die
fief a new vassal owed to his seigneur)
• Allodial land (alleux: land subject to no seigneur)
• Seigneur’s domain (dómame proche) (the portion o f a seigneurie directly con
trolled by the lord)
• Fiefs
III. Nobles more concerned than parishes
• Rentesfoncières
Although it had becom e essentially hereditary, the relation o f vassal and

suzerain was regarded as the result o f a contract freely entered. The "fealty
and hom age” that acknow ledged that relationship was a very uncom m on
subject o f discussion, and like other sym bolic trappings o f the seigneurial
regim e, was a largely noble concern. N obody besides the nobles seem ed to
care at all about the stream lined eighteenth-century version o f the on ce
pow erful drama in which the lord held the hands o f the vassal kneeling
before him and kissed him cm the m outh.118 A fter fealty and hom age there
follow ed "avow al and enum eration" (aveu et dénombrement), a detailed
declaration o f the resou rces o f the fief into w hose possession one had
entered. A s for the other term s in Table 2 .7 , a freehold alleu was a
landholding that had no seigneur o f any kind, while by rentes foncières w e
refer to regular paym ents devoid o f seigneurial im plications.
I have already com m ented on the lim ited interest the cahiers express in
fiefs, freeholds, avowal and enum eration and discussions o f the land over
which the lords had "useful” rights (the domaineproche). N ext to no interest
is expressed by the Third E state, although the parishes pay som e attention.
A s for rentes foncières, the peasants take no note and the nobility not
much m ore. A small but notable num ber o f Third Estate assem blies have
som ething to say on the subject o f regular paym ents to the lord that do not
acknow ledge the corpus o f seigneurial rights.119 In the general lack o f
118. Marc Bloch, FeudalSodety (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964), 145-46.
119. Discussions of rentes foncières as an aspect of the seigneurial regime are found in 0% of
parish caters, 2% of noble caters, and 14% of Third Estate cahiers.
interest in what som e would have held to be feudal claim s in a strict sen se,
w e see here a small forerunner o f the thinking o f the National A ssem bly.
We shall see others.
That the nobility are a little m ore likely to bring aspects o f the feudal
hierarchy into the public lim elight should not obscure, how ever, the m ore
essential fact that raising such m atters is rather rare even for them . W hile
many o f those assem blies who chose speech rather than silence on the sub
je ct o f seigneurialism are apt to stress status distinctions, few noble
assem blies care to go near those status m arkers that differentiate one lord
from the n e x t T he noble concern with maintaining a status boundary
betw een them selves and com m oners cannot be equated w ith anything that
even begins to resem ble a nostalgia for a fully elaborated hierarchical im age
o f society, w here noble vassals ow ed allegiance to noble suzerains.
One m ight be tem pted to argue that this lack o f support for an internal
hierarchy within the nobility is the result o f the particular way o f constituting
the assem blies that adopted noble cahiers. The convocation rules enabled
lesser nobles, poorer nobles, and nobles w ithout fiefs to participate1201 —
2
although not going quite so far as to em brace those am ong the ennobled
w hose new ly granted status was not transm issible to heirs. The assem blies
w ere not restricted to the great lords w ho generally spoke for their order
and w ho could be outvoted by their usually m ore obscure fellow s. If the
rules produced this effect, how ever, is this not a sign that those lesser
nobles had bought into the vision o f an internally undifferentiated brother
hood o f w arriors’ descendants put forw ard by Count H enri de Boulainvil-
lersm rather than the m inutely graded structure o f hierarchical nuance
associated with the high Princes o f the B lood?122 If the Third E state’s voice
<xi feudal hierarchy was nearly still, the nobility did not offer m uch m ore
than a w hisper; w as that a lack o f interest— or w as it paralysis in assem blies
120. This was a subject of the most bitter intra-noble controversy in Provence. See Jean Egret,
"La prérévolution en Provence,” Annales historiques de la Révolution française (1954): 97-126;
Jules Viguier, La convocation des étatsgénéraux en Provence (Paris: Lenoir, 1896); Monique Cubells,
Les horizons de la liberté: Naissance de la Révolution en Provence (1787-1789) (Aix: Edisud, 1987).
121. François Furet and Mona Ozouf speak of BoulainviDiers reinstalling "equality inside inequal
ity” (“Deux légitimations historiques de la société française au XVŒe siècle: Mably et Boulainvü-
Sers,” Annales: Economies, Sociétés, Civilisations 34 [1979]: 444). On the eve of revolution
antihierarchical conceptions were emerging even among social forces most devoted to hierarchy.
Although the fief-holding nobility of Provence continued to insist on excluding non-fief-holders from
provincial bodies representing the nobility, and were to attempt to have them excluded from the
noble elections to the Estates-GeneraL they decided, in 1787, on something resembling equality
among themselves: in public ceremonials they would march in order of age, rather than in order of
the dignity of their fiefs. (Even this "little revolution” as Monique Cubells calls it, drew some
protests from the most conservative.) See Cubells, Horizons de la liberté, 11.
122. Franldin L. Ford, Robe andSword: TheRegroupingoftheFrenchAristocracy afterLouisXJV
(New York: Harper and Row, 1965), 173-87.
containing both the great and the low ly? Regardless, it is d ea r that the
nobles are very far from an organic conservatism .123
N ow consider rentes foncières, the last item in Table 2 .7 , and the only
category m ore salient to the nobility than to the parishes but not the Third
E state. The term w as used to indicate regular paym ents to the lord that
w ere “ sim ple” paym ents, that unlike the cens w ere not used to acknow ledge
the fact o f lordship. The term then has nothing to do with the status m arkers
that the lords are m ore prone to discuss than the Third E state; and it is
used in establishing the sorts o f fine distinction in which the people o f the
countryside have little in terest Indeed, as w e shall repeatedly see, peasants
would have the greatest interest in ignoring such distinctions when they
reacted to the new revolutionary legislation that was soon to com e. The
legislators would attem pt to distinguish som e seigneurial rights, to be sim ply
abolished as m ere relics o f a feudal p a st from seigneurial rights that retained
som e legitim acy (see Chapters 8 and 9 ). W hile the cahiers o f nobles and
Third E state show little interest in the particular distinction em bodied in the
notion o f nonseigneurial rentes foncières, the peasants show none. The
exceptional character o f the last item in Table 2 .7 , then, is not so much
that the nobles are unusually concerned as that the peasants are un
usually unconcerned. D oes this mean that the peasants are insensitive to
fine distinctions o f any kind? We shall consider their ow n distinctions in
Chapter 3.
The subjects distinctively salient to the Third E state are presented in
Table 2 .8 . Reinforcing the picture painted above, w e see that six o f the
eleven categories constitute constraints on the m arket: m onopolies, dues
on fairs and m arkets, com pulsory labor services, mutation fees, rights to
first wine sales, and tolls. But the cens, the obligation o f “ watch and ward”
(le guet et la garde), hunting rights, and the rentesfoncières do not have this
character. The picture here is less clear-cut than w as that o f the nobility.
The stress on m arket hindrances in the cahiers of the urban notables, while
m arked, does not exclude other concerns, am ong them the strong focu s on
privilege that may underlie the special attention to hunting. Indeed, it may
123. Consider the alienation of the royal domain, one of the issues most widely voiced by the
nobility as part of its particular stress on state finances. While a handful of noble assemblies asserted
the traditional inalienability of crown holdings—an element of an integralist vision of an immutable
social order—the great majority were eager to do anything with royal land that would speed the
flow of resources to the treasury, including the traditionally forbidden sale of this land. Nobles were
in the forefront, then, both of sacralizing “property” in defense against state claims and excluding
royal lands from this defense (thereby sharpening the demarcation of the public and the private).
The major point here, to which we will refer repeatedly, is that the nobles, when they defended
seigneurial rights at all, did so with modem notions of property and not older notions of hierarchy.
The secondary point is that what was covered by the sacred aura of “property” was quite flexible;
and if nobles could be flexible in deploying this powerful word in their cahiers, revolutionary
legislators, we shall see, could be similarly flexible soon afterward.
be the them e o f privilege that distinguishes the other rights m ost salient to
the Third E state. The cens w as not ju st any m onetary paym ent, but
acknow ledged a dependency on the lord; rentes foncières w ere quite the
opposite, and, therefore, tend to be m entioned in the cahiers precisely when
what was at issue was what m akes a lord m ore than another proprietor. A s
for “ watch and w ard,” even in its attenuated form as a cash paym ent, w asn't
this a rem inder that a château was m ore than ju st a large house?
To the extent that peasants, urban notables, and nobles attended to the
seigneurial regim e in M arch and April 1789 they differed in the fo d o f their
expressed concerns. France’s rural m ajority saw a cluster o f claim s upon
their often precarious resou rces w hile the nobles w ere particularly likely to
stress public displays o f deferen ce. And the Third E state, am ong its many
concerns, stands out for its attention to m arket barriers.
The Third E state is at least as striking for the range and variety o f its
concerns as it is for precisely what those concerns w ere. For if the rural
cahiers are relatively m ore preoccupied with the seigneurial exactions, the
lengthy and com plex docum ents o f the urban notables have a lengthier and
m ore com plex agenda. Rural France, w e shall see in Chapter 3, exp resses
the stronger urge to abolish seigneurial institutions; but it is the urban
com m oners w ho have the m ost to say and say it with the greatest com
plexity.
A s for the nobles, their silent reserve is no less dram atic than the subjects
they address. And when they speak, as w e shall see in Chapter 3, a
significant group o f “ maintainers” vies with their “ abolitionists.” T hey are
divided w ith an intensity that has no parallel am ong the unprivileged. T here
is a m agnificent study o f another revolutionary upheaval that is very
suggestive h ere. O liver Radkey has exhaustively explored the question o f
Ifcble 2 .8 . Seigneurial Subjects o f Relatively Greater Sabotee to the Third Estate than
to the Peasantry
• Miscellaneous seigneurial rights

• Seigneurial monopolies, in general
• Le guet et la garde (in former times, service o f watching over the château; now
commuted into a money fee)
• Right to collect dues at fairs or markets; includes exclusive right to establish a market
• Compulsory labor services
• Cens
• Rentesfoncières
• Mutation fees on property transfer, in general
• Hunting rights
• Right to forbid peasants to sell wine before seigneur does (banvm)
• Seigneurial tolls
how the Socialist Revolutionary party, overw helm ingly the largest party
follow ing the abdication o f the czar, managed to fritter away its apparently
com m anding lead. A minute exam ination o f its internal debates, m eetings,
w ritings, and public positions show s it frequently unable to arrive at anything
resem bling a consensus. In many party con gresses and assem blies in 1917,
« i many critical issues, its internal vote was deeply split; m oreover, a large
num ber o f party delegates abstained. A bstention was so characteristic o f
the ill-fated SRs that it was often the position (nonposition?) o f a plurality o f
voting m em bers. The SRs w ere a great party o f abstainers, Radkey
concludes, a fatal w eakness in the clim ate o f intensive and extensive
m obilization o f a m ultiplicity o f groups passionately struggling for their
shifting interests and their evolving b eliefs.124 The nobles in the spring o f
1789 w ere hardly a party, and they had already lost the leadership o f the
m ovem ent to regenerate France, but on a central pillar o f the Old Regim e,
m ore bitterly attacked than m ost, they w ere certainly abstainers.
124. Oliver Radkey, TheAgrarian Foes ofBolshevism: Promise andDefeatoftheRussianSocialist

Revolutionaries, February to October, 1917 (New York; Columbia University Press, 1958).
C h apter
3
T hree R e v o l u t io n a r y
P rogram s
Openness to Change
In the last chapter, w e considered the distinct agendas o f parishes, Third
E state, and nobility. In this chapter, w e turn to what w e may call their
program s. We shall explore what they want to do about seigneurial rights.
In term s o f our coding o f grievances (see Chapter 2, pp. 2 3 -2 5 ), w e are
shifting from a focu s on the subjects o f grievances to their actions. A s in
Chapter 2, w e m ay sharpen our analysis o f rural grievances over seigneurial
rights through com parison with dem ands about other obligations o f the
peasantry, nam ely, state taxation and ecclesiastical exactions. We shall do
this in three specific w ays. First, w e may deepen our search for what is
distinctive about seigneurial rights through establishing contrasts with other
burdens. Second, w e may test (and refine) our hypotheses about the w ays
in which villagers distinguish one seigneurial right from another by seeing if
they distinguish one tax from one another (or one ecclesiastical claim from
another) along the sam e lines. And, third, w e may see grievances about the
seigneurial regim e as part o f a larger w hole, as one portion o f a m osaic

o f grievances.
To com pare our three groups is to look for significant variations on the
them e o f change. H ow open to change w ere F rance's villagers, elite
urbanites, and nobles? Tocqueville argued that the repercussions o f centu
ries o f m onarchical centralization had so greatly strained social relations that
virtually all w ere eager for radical m easures. Their dealings with the
standardization im posed by the grow ing state had im bued France’s elite,
noble and com m oner alike, with an openness tow ard change, a com m itm ent
to rationality and a disparagem ent o f social arrangem ents bequeathed by the
p a st In a classical summary o f his analysis o f the cahiers o f the nobility,
Tocqueville w rote: “ Like all other Frenchm en, they regard France as a trial
field— a sort o f political m odel farm— in which everything should be tried,
everything turned upside down, except the little spot in which their particu
lar privileges grow . To their honor, it may even be said that they did not
w holly spare that sp o t In a w ord, it is seen from these cahiers that the
only thing the nobles lacked to effect the Revolution was the rank o f
com m oners.” 1
W ere the nobles alm ost as open to change as the Third E state? Tables
3.1 and 3 .2 show som e o f the broad orientations o f the French with regard
to the claim s o f lord, church, and state as w ell as their grievances on other
su bjects.2 1 have classified the dem ands under a few broad rubrics. We see
that noble assem blies only rarely called for the integral m aintenance o f
French institutions. It is true that w ith such large num bers o f grievances
the 2% o f noble dem ands that w ere dead set against change on m atters
other than the three burdens is reliably greater than the Third E state’s
1%. But this marginally greater noble conservatism hardly invalidates the
essentially Tocquevillean picture, particularly when one notes how much
stronger is the degree to which both groups favored abolition over conserva
tion. Apart from seigneurial rights, even the nobles w ere m ore likely to
propose abolition than preservation. One m ight w ish to dispute Tocquevüle’s
picture in a relative sense, how ever, for the propensity to abolish is far
greater still in the general cahiers o f the Third E state and still m ore so out
in the countryside. (Table 3 .3 em phasizes th is.) That the nobles m ay have
been significantly open to change and thereby helped bring on the collapse,
does not m ean that they w ere so eager for change as potential non-noble
elite rivals (a point Tocqueville does not give its due w eight) let alone their
rural dependents (a m atter not on Tocqueville’s mind at all). M ore striking
1. Alexis de Tocquevile, The Old Regime and the French Revolution (Garden City, N.Y.:
Doubleday, 1955), 272.
2. Tables 3.1 and 3.2 are fundamental to this chapter and shall be referred to at many points in
the discussion.
T hree Revolutionary P rograms 67
is the extent o f genuine noble conservatism on that “ little sp o t," as

Tocqueville so disarm ingly puts it, o f their ow n concerns. N oble enthusiasm
for defending the seigneurial rights outruns any propensity to abolish them .
A longside the substantial noble avoidance o f discussing the seigneurial rights
at all that w e saw in Chapter 2, w e now m ust place the conservatism o f a
portion o f those nobles w ho are not silent, a conservatism all the m ore
striking since even the nobles are pushing, like the others, for change in
m ost arenas, even if perhaps not so radically. But should w e be willing to
minim ize, along w ith Tocqueville, the arenas o f noble intransigence? The
“little spot” includes, along with seigneurial rights, issues o f privileged
access to high p osts and the voting rules to be follow ed in the E states-
GeneraL3 A re the nobles overw helm ingly and fundamentally liberal or are
they— or rather a portion o f them — intransigent when it really counts?
Ways of Changing and Ways of Keeping

G eorge Taylor raised the issue o f the revolutionary consciousness o f the
French at the on set o f the Revolution and, drawing on his study o f the
cahiers, urged us to see little such consciousness anywhere and virtually
none as far as the parishes are concern ed.4 But w e have ju st seen that all
groups share an openness to change, although to different degrees and with
different m anifestations. Proposals that institutions be maintained w ithout
substantial alteration are generally quite rare; they only characterize the
nobility on seigneurial rights.5 This is rather closer to Tocqueville’s view
than it is to Taylor’s .6
M y analysis departs from Taylor’s in another particular the radicalism o f
the countryside. In noting how little advanced Enlightenm ent ideas w ere
3. John Markoff and Gibert Shapiro, “Consensus and Conflict at the Onset of Revolution: A
Quantitative Study of France m1799,“ AmericanJournal ofSociology 91 (1985): 44-47.
4. George V. Taylor, "Revolutionary and Nonrevolutionary Content in the Cahiers ci 1789: An
Interim Report,” French HistoricalStudies 7 (1972): 479-502.
5. Cahiers that call for reform but also insist that an institution be maintained are also only
characteristic of the nohihty on seigneurial rights.
6. This is the first of several points where my sifting of evidence diverges in important ways
from George Taylor’s. One reason is the difference in coding: Taylor does not distinguish the
agenda from theprogram; that is, he does not separately code the subject under discussion as wefl
as the action demanded. He therefore cannot count demands to abolish something independently of
that something. I do not dispute Taylor’s contention that few cahiers at all (and fewer parish cahiers
in particular) closely approximate the programs oí the revolutionary assemblies, but their support
for change of some sort (as assessed by examining the actions demanded) is very substantial;
although I find with Ibylor that individual seigneurial rights are discussed in fewer parish cahiers
than general cahiers of the Third Estate, I also find that those parishes that do discuss a particular
right tend to be more radical, a significant element that Taylor’s method does not detect
(583)
§ w M 00 N co h cm e* in
Nobility
(103)
w4 CO 00 CO in O N O N
(2,409)
*
<0 o
(2,817)
i-H in o C
Q in
CQ i- t
Third Estate
(394)
o N N N O H N in
(4,795)
« o 9) (O m o h mm
8 co (2,174)
o mc 4 <0 o o i n o
ftrish es
(357)
(6,032)
Actions Demanded
T hree R evolutionary P rograms 69
Table 3 .2 . Demands Concerning Institutions Other than Taxation, Ecclesiastical

Payments, and Seigneurial Rights (% )
Action Demanded Parishes Third Estate Nobility
Abolish without compensation 12% 10% 8%

Indemnify 1 1 1
Maintain substantially unaltered 1 1 2
Maintain with reforms 1 1 2
Reform 24 24 22
Replace 1 1 1
Unfavorable 11 3 4
Favorable 2 1 2
“ Do Something” 1 1 2
Local demand 9 5 2
Provincial demand 2 5 5
(AO (19,074) (38,691) (23,262)
Thble 3 .3 . Ratio o f Propensity to Demand “Abolish” to Propensity to

Demand “ Maintain”
Subject o f Grievances Parishes Third Estate Nobility
Seigneurial grievances 37.8 14.7 0.6

Other grievances 11.9 6.7 2.7
evident in rural dem ands and how little the parish cahiers addressed the
great questions that the National A ssem bly w as to take up, Taylor urged us
to see the peasantry as far less o f a force for change than has som etim es
been held.7 If w e accept that one elem ent o f the idea o f “ radicalism ’’ is
captured by the ratio o f “ abolish” to “ maintain,” w e see in Table 3 .3 that by
this m easure the parishes are the m ost radical and the nobles lea st T he
specific targets o f the m ost extrem e peasant dem ands also distinguish their
cahiers. W hile all three groups are m ore prone to abolish burdens than other
institutions (w ith the usual and.significant exception o f the nobility on
seigneurial rights), the peasants are even m ore unyielding on the seigneurial
rights than the urban notables.8
7. Alfred Cobban’s view of the peasants as markedly more radical on the seigneurial regime
than the triumphant urban groups that they had to push beyond foot dragging is specifically
repudiated by Taylor. See Cobban, The Social Interpretation of the French Revolution (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1965), 53; Taylor, "Revolutionary and Non-revolutiooary Content in
the Cahiers,” 495-96.
S. Note by way of contrast that the parishes are marginally less radical than the Third Estate
on taxation and markedly less radical on ecclesiastical exactions.
Peasant hostility to the seigneurial regim e is sim ply greater than the
elites’, as is their hostility to institutions other than burdens. If one asks
how com pletely the peasants anticipate the National A ssem bly in its w ork o f
reconstruction as w ell as destruction, there is little in the present analysis
that departs from G eorge Taylor’s conclusions about the countryside. (T he
parishes also make few er dem ands and tend not to discuss the sam e
institutions as each oth er.)9 But if one asks how hostile w as village France
to those Old Regim e institutions they ch ose to discuss in their ow n texts,
one form s quite a different picture. The reconstruction o f a new France may
not have been their w ork, but their cahiers are m ore enthusiastic than the
elites’ about the destruction o f the old; am ong the old institutions they
are particularly hostile to their burdens; and am ong their burdens, the
seigneurial regim e.
We can m ore fully appreciate the m ore extrem e dem ands for abolition or
m aintenance by taking a look at rather m ore com plex actions. The proposal
that som eone may be dispossessed o f a right in return for financial com pen
sation (which w e call “ indem nify" h ere) is for all groups less com m on than
“abolish," but it is an action that hardly occu rs in the cahiers at all excep t in
the am text o f seigneurial institutions. If there is anything that m ost clearly
distinguishes grievances about the seigneurial regim e from other grievances,
it is the frequency o f the call for this action. And if there is anything that
m ost clearly distinguishes the positions o f the people o f the countryside
from the Third Estate elite it is this sam e issue. It is not often applied to
ecclesiastical paym ents (and hardly at all by the rural com m unities) and is
alm ost totally irrelevant in the area o f taxation or in institutional areas other
than burdens. Indem nification is m ost m arked as a predilection o f the Third
E state, w hose cahiers urge this particular com prom ise on seigneurial rights
alm ost tw ice as frequently as do the docum ents o f the countryside (I shall
discuss indem nification in greater detail shortly. S ee p. 8 8 .)
Another interm ediary position betw een uncom pensated abolition and
integral m aintenance is “ reform ." Proposals to im prove the w ay in which an
institution functions include dem ands to elim inate its abuses (as opposed to
elim inating the institution itself); to abolish an aspect o f an institution while
leaving the basic structure in place; to im prove, m odify, or reorganize an
activity or practice; to standardize, sim plify, make predictable, clarify, or
otherw ise circum scribe it within definite rules; to redistribute its burdens
according to som e principle o f equity (by decreasing costs or by equalizing
costs or by making costs proportional to the ability to pay); to place an
institution under the control o f som e superior authority or to rem ove it from
9. The mean number of demands is 40 for parishes, 234 for the Third Estate, and 158 for the
nobility. See Table 2.3 and Markoff and Shapiro, "Consensus and Conflict,” 39.
such con trol; to com bine it with (or separate it from ) another institution or
to change adm inistrative boundaries; to increase its speed or responsive
ness; to change the m odalities o f a burden (for exam ple, com m uting a
paym ent in labor or kind into a cash paym ent). Such proposals are strikingly
less likely to be evoked by the seigneurial rights than other institutions.
A third interm ediary position is that an institution be replaced, by another.
Such dem ands for replacem ent are consistently less frequent for seigneurial
institutions than for taxation and, apart from the parishes, less frequent than
for ecclesiastical exactions. Dem ands for replacem ent or reform are both
acknowledgm ents o f a certain vitality by the dissatisfied. An institution may
be held to serve a purpose but to be operating inadequately or in a way
that, adequate or not, carries associated and unnecessary costs. W isdom
suggests im proving the institution rather than destroying it; or, if destroyed,
creating a substitute. Alternatively, an institution may be held to be w ithout
value or its purpose may be rejected, yet a sense o f political realism
suggests that abolition is beyond attainm ent Am elioration then becom es
the best one may hope for. T h ose w ho wish a seigneurial institution
elim inated, on the other hand, see no harmful void that needs to be filled.
A s for the satisfied, they may say nothing if com placent or em barrassed;
they may call for preservation if threatened; or they may propose a
com prom ise am elioration under challenge. Such a reform acknow ledges the
value to them o f an institution hard to defend in its present form .
The Third E state and parishes are m arkedly less likely to propose reform
for a seigneurial institution than they are for ecclesiastical exactions or for
institutions other than burdens; and a great deal less likely than for taxes
(w ith these differences all tending to be sm aller for the nobility). Com pared
to oth er institutions the seigneurial regim e is neither seen as reform able nor
w orth replacing. Its enem ies want it gone and its sm aller num ber o f vocal
friends want it as it w as. It had a life o f sorts but it could not stim ulate
visions o f vital change. B y way o f striking contrast, taxation is not m erely
seen as m ore reform able than seigneurial rights, it is far m ore prone to
attract reform dem ands than m ost institutions (com pare Tables 3.1 and 3 .2 ).
In sum the seigneurial regim e is the occasion o f m ore extrem e proposals
than many other facets o f the Old Regim e. But it also is the occasion o f an
alm ost unique m oderate demand for indem nification. It is an occasion as w ell
for the nobility to keep their thoughts to them selves— but when those
thoughts are expressed they show a profoundly divided nobility, in which
the conservative thrust has an edge. The noble conservative thrust, indeed,
is m ore pronounced than for m ost other institutions; nonetheless, a signifi
cant num ber o f noble docum ents propose abolition while reform is as much
a part o f their agenda as anyone else’s. The seigneurial regim e is also the
occasion for the peasantry to show them selves m ore inclined to abolition
pure and sim ple than are the urban notables, am ong whom there is significant
support for financial com pensation.10
To Abolish or to Maintain
Peasant and Third Estate Radicalism
If seigneurial rights stand apart from other burdens— and, indeed, from
other grievances generally— by the extent o f rural radicalism as w ell as by
the extent o f both noble silence and noble conservatism , a closer scrutiny
should prove enlightening. W hile peasant attitudes toward the seigneurial
regim e have been the subject o f considerable scrutiny and even m ore obiter
dicta, what is needed is a m ore minute analysis. The sam e is true with
regard to other peasant burdens. Som e have seen peasant proposals to
reform parts o f the seigneurial regim e, rather than condem nation o f it as a
totality, as signs o f an intellectual incapacity to grasp a social w hole or a
pow erful conservatism im perm eable to Enlightenm ent ideas (as have, for
exam ple, William D oyle or G eorge Taylor; see Chapter 2, p. 19). In
contrast, I shall argue here that French villagers show a thoughtful and
nuanced capacity to differentiate am ong their burdens and that they had
their ow n sort o f radicalism . To see this, w e need to go beyond the
seigneurial regim e as a w hole and consider its distinct com ponents.
Table 3 .4 presents the proportion o f parish and Third Estate cahiers that
demand that a particular seigneurial right11 be maintained essentially without
change or that it be abolished outright. We are concerned, for the m om ent,
only with the drastic step o f abolition without providing financial com pensa
tion for the lord. We will turn to that other very im portant option shortly.
Similarly, by "maintain” w e have in mind only proposals to retain an
institution essentially as is; proposals for institutional reform will also be
taken up below .
Am ong the urban notables as am ong peasants and rural artisans, there is
10. A more complex statistical analysis of these matters is possible. Stanley Lieberson developed
a measure of agreement that may be extended to analyze consensus (or its absence) in the sort of
data we have here. This analysis reveals the degree to which the nobles had less consensus on the
seigneurial regime than on most other facets of French society, as well as the degree to which the
seigneurial regime stands out as one of the arenas in which the Third Estate and nobility most
strongly differ. See John Markoff, “Suggestions for the Measurement of Consensus," American
Sociological Review 47 (1982): 290-98; Markoff and Shapiro, “Consensus and Conflict”
11. This table includes all seigneurial rights discussed by at least 20 cahiers of the parishes or 20
of the Third Estate. Omitted from this analysis are aspects of the seigneurial system that are not
seigneurial claims to money, goods, services, or honor (e.g., “allodial land" or “seigneurial
legal specialists”).
virtually no support for retaining any aspect o f the seigneurial regim e in its
current form . The closest to being an acceptable institution to the Third
E state is the financially trivial but sym bolically enorm ous m oney rent, the
cens, w hose m aintenance is advocated by a scant 7% o f those cahiers that
treat it The lord’s possession o f an exclusive right to bear arms is acceptable
as it stands to 5% o f the peasant assem blies. O f the 25 rights in this table,
21 are unacceptable in their present form to every rural assem bly in our
sam ple, 15 to all those o f the Third Estate. Demands for outright abolition
o f seigneurial rights, without com pensation, occu r in a m ajority o f the parish
cahiers in regard to 14 types o f rights; the corresponding figure for the
Third E state is eigh t The parishes and Third Estate tend to be relatively
tough cm the sam e institutions as each oth er,121 3but the parishes tend to be
m ore extrem e on m ore categories: for 18 seigneurial rights, the parishes
are m ore likely to insist on abolition. The m ost striking evidence o f both the
existence and lim itations o f peasant radicalism , how ever, is the significant
m inority that wants to abolish the seigneurial regim e as a w hole. It is
actually a larger m inority than is found among the cahiers o f the Third E state.
O f the various m aterial burdens, both the parishes and the Third E state
are far m ore prone to insist on the abolition o f the various seigneurial
m onopolies, the dues on fairs and m arkets, the com pulsory labor services,
the seigneurial tolls, or the property transfer dues than they are with regard
to periodic dues. Neme o f the half-dozen form s o f regular paym ents is nearly
so likely to have its outright abolition demanded as alm ost any o f the specific
rights in the other broad categories listed above. Indeed, apart from the
right to bear arms and “ seigneurial courts, m iscellaneous," the regular
paym ents in cash or kind actually seem the least loathed feature o f the
seigneurial regim e in the villages as w ell as the tow ns. It is easy enough to
suggest that the petty amount o f the censu accounts for the low proportion
o f dem ands to abolish. The champart was a far heavier burden, which may
account for the considerably greater tendency shown by the peasants to
demand its suppression; nevertheless assem blies that demand abolition o f
champart are for less num erous than those w ho make radical proposals
about m ost seigneurial rights other than regular dues. W hy aren’t the dues
treated so harshly as the lords’ other claim s? We shall return to this question
after considering the other distinctions Table 3 .4 displays.
The various recreational privileges w ere not treated with anything resem
bling uniform ity. W hile nearly four parish cahiers in five (o f those discussing
the subject) favored abolishing the right to raise rabbits, a relatively low tw o
12. The correlation of the proportion of documents calling for abolition in the two groups is .75
(computed for the 27 subjects discussed in at least ten cahiers).
13. The cens was often not worth the trouble of collecting. See Marcel Garaud, Histoiregtnirale
du droitpriaifrançais, vol 1, La Révolution et rigolte civile (Paris: Recueil Sirey, 1953), 167.
Table 3.4. Parish and Third Estate Documents Demanding that Seigneurial Rights Be
Abolished (Without Compensation) or Maintained (%)
Parishes Third Estate
Right*
* Abolish Maintain (AO Abolish Maintain (AO
Ariodicdues
Cens 3% 0% (17) 4% 7% (28)
Champart 21 0 (92) 13 2 (61)
Censet rentes 24 0 (86) 0 3 (37)
Periodic dues ingeneral 15 1 (86) 7 0 (30)
Miscellaneous periodic dues 10 0 (38) 23 0 (22)
Seigneurialmonopolies
Monopoly on ovens 66 0 (39) 56 2 (50)
Monopoly on milling 79 0 (128) 44 0 (70)
Monopoly on wine press 72 0 (37) 59 0 (44)
Monopolies ingeneral 66 0 (90) 40 0 (103)
Assessmentson economicactivity
Seigneurial tolls 60 0 (61) 53 0 (117)
Dues on fairs andmarkets 51 0 (17) 36 0 (45)
Propertytransferrights
Dueson property transfers(Jodset ventes) 49 0 (60) 37 0 (49)
Retrait 75 0 (36) 44 4 (48)
Justice
Seigneurial courts ingeneral 53 0 (104) 53 3 (90)
Seigneurial courts, miscellaneous 21 3 (41) 23 2 (56)
Recreationalprivileges
Hunting rights 39 2 (97) 14 2 (107)
Right to raise pigeons 57 0 (152) 38 0 (96)
Right to raise rabbits 79 0 (35) 51 0 (39)
Fishingrights 45 0 (17) 21 0 (24)
Symbolicdeference
Right to beararms 12 5 (27) 24 0 (41)
Serfdom
Mainmorte 55 0 (9) 56 0 (36)
Serfdomingeneral 64 0 (18) 69 0 (26)
Other
Compulsory labor services 66 0 (102) 51 0 (109)
Miscellaneous right 51 0 (54) 44 3 (79)
Regime ingeneral 29 0 (112) 18 2 (91)
‘Rights discussed in at least 20 parish or 20 Third Estate cahiers (and in at least 5 of each).
NoU to Thbtes 3.4 and 35: Since our action code “Abolish” includes proposals to eliminate an institution with or
without compensation, and since, moreover, a document calling for the abolition of, say, seigneurial tolls in one ar
ticle might, in another article, discuss the subject of indemnitites, we only counted an instance of “abolish” if a
cahier does not also demand indemnification. There are several possible ways in which demands to abolish coex
ist with demands to indemnify and we adopted the following rules:
• If “abolish without compensation” was presented as the preferred option, with indemnification merely
an acceptable second best, we count this as a demand for abolition without compensation only.
'hU e 3.5. Noble Documents Demanding that Seigneurial Rights Be Abolish«] (Without
C<Hnpensation) or Maintained (%)
Right* Abolish Maintain (N)
toriodkdues
Cens 14% 14% (7)%
Champart 0 22 (9)
Periodicdues ingeneral 0 0 (5)
Seigneurialmonopolies
Monopolies ingeneral 7 20 (15)
Assessments on economicactivity
Seigneurial tolls
Dues on fairs andmarkets 26 3 (39)
Propertytransferri&Us 33 0 (6)
Duesonproperty transfers (Jodset ventes)
Justice
Seigneurial courts ingeneral n
V 17 (6)
Seigneurialcourts, miscellaneous (27)
7 41
Recreationalprivileges 12 18 (17)
Huntingrights (27)
Right to raise pigeons *A9 2A
0 8 (12)
Symbolicdeferencepatterns
Right to beararms 17 (30)
Honorific rights 3
0 43 (21)
Fealtyandhomage (foiethommage) 11 A
u (9)
Avowal andenumeration (aveuetdénombrement) A
u
A
U (9)
Symbolicdeference patterns ingeneral 0 67 (27)
Serfdom
Mainmorte 40 0 (5)
Serfdomingeneral (7)
71 0
Other
Compulsorylaborservices 15 8 (13)
Miscellaneous right 20 15 (20)
Regime ingeneral 3 26 (34)
Institutions discussed in at least 5 Noble cahiers.
• If, on the other hand, the two options are posed as equally desirable alternatives wc count both demands
on the grounds that the cahier evinces half-hearted support for both positions. (While this situation was
most difficult to classify; it is also so rare as not to be of any statistical consequence.)
• I t on yet a third hand, there is no statement in the text clarifying the relationship of the two demands,
we treat this as only a demand for indemnification.
• For a miscellaneous category, for example, "miscellaneous periodic dues,” we examine the Free
Remarks that our coders are permitted to write to see if “abolish” and "indemnify” refer to the same or
different institutions. If different, we have two (or more) distinct demands; if identical, we apply one of
the other decision rules.
• If a seigneurial right is to be abolished under some circumstances but indemnified under others, we re
gard this as a demand for indemnification. We treat this as a complex demand spelling out the modali
ties of indemnification. (Such demands typically ask that there be indemnification if there is a title deed,
but not otherwise; or insist on abolition of the king's seigneurial rights, but indemnification for others.)
in five wanted an end to exclusive hunting rights and a m ere 14% o f the
Third Estate favored such a m ove. What is the basis for the sharp distinction
drawn am ong these similar rights? For now , w e m erely pose the question.
Unlike the periodic dues, serfdom was dearly loathed by those who
addressed it, and along with seigneurial tolls, it invited the m ost consistently
radical position o f the Third Estate. Serfdom had been the subject o f much
discussion during the eighteenth century and provided the subject for som e
o f Voltaire’s m ost successful polem ics. Serfdom was also the target o f one
o f the Old Regim e’s few reform s o f seigneurial rights. In 1779, perhaps
follow ing the lead o f the neighboring duchy o f Savoy,14 Louis XVI ended
serfdom on royal lands. (Although the royal edict called on other lords to do
the sam e,15 few did so, and these few often seem to have obtained
com pensation from the serfs in cash or land in return for em ancipation.)16 In
light o f this campaign it is not surprising that the cahiers o f the Third Estate
are so bitterly hostile to Ma crim e against hum anity,” 17 a hostility m atched
by those peasant docum ents that address the issue. But what is perhaps
m ore rem arkable is the level o f peasant indifference. M ackrell sees serfdom
as a picturesque literary issue with which intellectuals am used them selves
rather than as a central concern o f a burdened peasantry.18 The evidence
seem s broadly consistent with M ackrell’s suggestion. Parish cahiers that
take up serfdom are as antagonistic as those o f the Third E state, but to
return for a m om ent to Table 2 .4 , very few rural docum ents have any
discussion at all.19 W hy was the French peasantry so often silent on an
institution that, when discussed, was clearly hated? Was it not they, after
all, w ho w ere serfdom ’s victim s?
Perhaps w e may attribute the lade o f w idespread peasant hatred for a
rural institution so repeatedly described as m orally loathsom e by the urban
notables to a peasant inability to forge a national agenda. Serfdom , after all,
was highly localized by the late eighteenth century in Franche-Com té and
Burgundy. Conceivably, the peasants o f those provinces w ere the only ones
14. Max Bruchet, L’Abolition des droits seigneuriaux en Savoie (1761-1793) (Annecy: Hérisson
Frères, 1908).
15. Garaud, Révolution et égalité civile, 26-29; jean MiHot, Le régimeßodal en Franche-Comtéau
XVIIle siècle (Besançon: Imprimerie MiDot Frères, 1937), 127-82; Jacques Necker, Oeuvres
complètes (Paris: Dreuttel and Würtz, 1820), 3:488-96.
16. Alphonse Aulard, La Révolution française et le régime féodal (Paris: Librairie Félix Alcan,
1919), 36.
17. Third Estate of Clermont-en-Beauvaisis, AP 2:755. Meeker’s recommendation to the king
speaks of mainmorte as "a form of servitude contrary to humanity” (Necker, Oeuvres, 3:488).
18. On the polemic against serfdom see John Q. C. Mackrek, The Attack on “Feudalism” m
Eighteenth-Century France (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul 1973), 104-32.
19. Chassin attempted to collect grievances about serfdom in the cahiers, and, strikingly, found
most of his material in the general cahiers of the Third Estate (Charles-Louis Chassin, L’église et ¡es
derniers serfs [Paris: Dentu, 1880], 155-91).
w ith much aw areness.20 Perhaps, how ever, w e may see som ething else as
w ell M ight eighteenth-century peasants have seen sinne benefits to which
serfdom ’s critics w ere indifferent? Paternalistic apologists for serfdom , after
all, insisted on its protection o f the serfs.21 Protection from what? Protection
against loss o f land under seigneurial pressures. Seigneurial institutions
w ere often used to force out marginal peasant proprietors, to seize land
through retrait, or to lay claim to pasture or fo re s t Lords might let arrears
accum ulate on periodic dues for years, then demand that peasants pay up,
and accept a land-for-debt swap; under retrait, a lord had the optional right
to substitute him self for the purchaser o f peasant land; and lords might hold
or fabricate a claim on a portion o f com m on land. M any seigneurial rights
could thus be put at the service o f landholders oriented to a grow ing
agricultural m arket, to such an extent that som e historians have w ondered
w hether peasant contestation might not be better described as a losing,
rear-guard struggle against a grow ing capitalism than a vanguard battle
against a dying feudalism in conjunction'w ith the victorious bou rgeoisie.22 In
such a context, did not the “ archaic” mainmorte actually preserve peasant
smallholdings at the sam e tim e as limiting their rights? Certainly this was
the judgm ent o f Pierre de Saint Jacob in his unsurpassed study o f the
seigneurial regim e in a region w here serfdom was far from dead. “Main
morte, ” he w rote, “w as in fact a protection .”23 Analyzing the varying su ccess
o f efforts at estate enlargem ent through dispossession o f small peasant
proprietors, he concludes that “ the regions o f mainmorte w ere alone in
exhibiting an extrem e stability o f peasant property” (462).
This paternalistic defense o f serfdom was scorned by no less a critic than
\bltaire. The lords, Voltaire w rites, may w ell contend that liberty will be
“ pernicious to those held to the soiL” T hese lords are forgetting the
great social transform ation that accom panies liberty, nam ely, industry and
prosperity.24 But the sage o f Fem ey forgets som ething him self: the proletar
ianization that accom panies industry and prosperity. We do not necessarily
20. The peasants of the baütiage of Baume, for example, overwhelminglycontemned mainmorte.
See Maurice Gresset, Gens de justice à Besançon de la conquite par Louis XIV à la Révolution
française (1674-1789) (Paris: Bibliothèque Nationale, 1978), 2:730.
21. For example, the Academy of Besançon in 1778 awarded a prize to an essay by a member of
the serf-holding abbey of Luxeufl that argued that many peasants actually preferred the economic
security of serfdom to the freedom to become destitute (Aulard, Révolution française et régime
féodal 31-33).
22. Georges Lefebvre introduced the idea of an anticapitalist aspect to peasant action in 1789
and beyond. See Georges Lefebvre, "La Révolution française et les paysans,” in Etudes sur la
Révolutionfrançaise (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1963), 343.
23. Pierre de Saint Jacob, Les paysans de la Bourgogne du Nord au dernier siècle de l’Ancien
Régime (Paris: Société Les Belles Lettres, 1960), 48.
24. \bttaire, “Coutume de Franche-Comté, sur l’esclavage imposé à des citoyens par une vieille
coutume,” Oeuvres complètes (Paris: Garnier Frères, 1879), 28:378.
need to see in the failure o f the parish cahiers to w rite so frequently o f

serfdom with envenom ed passion as do the urban notables, a sign o f the
intellectual backwardness o f village France, nor o f w idespread ignorance or
indifference to an abuse confined to a few provinces. On the contrary,
abstaining on serfdom may be a sign o f peasant intellectual independence
from those w ho claim ed to know their interests, but w hose ow n interests
w ere far from identical with theirs. Indeed, let us look ahead to the
revolutionary legislation. The initial form assum ed by the abolition o f serf
dom a year after the cahiers w ere w ritten, in fact, left the new ly em ancipated
serfs heavily burdened by their lords’ claim s (see Chapter 8, p. 461). The
Third E state’s disgust with the humiliation o f servile status may not have
been the main issue for those held to be humiliated.
The indifference o f the countryside to what the upper reaches o f the
Third Estate took to be the degraded serf status appears part o f a broader
syndrom e. The peasants w ere particularly hostile to rights w here the
m aterial exaction was severe and far less hostile w here the sym bolization o f
status was central (see Chapter 2, p. 42). There was a lack o f peasant
interest in abolishing the financially insignificant cens as there was in the
m onopoly on bearing arm s. The cens had an im portant sym bolic value,
how ever, as a mark o f the seigneur’s “ direct” rights generally.25 This seem s
not to have im pressed the peasants, but when fused with other, higher
paym ents as cens et rentes, a m arkedly higher proportion opted for abolition.
(The Third E state, with no proposals to abolish cens et rentes, had other
ideas concerning periodic paym ents as w e shall see, p. 124 e t seq .)
Similarly, the right to bear arms is not a target for abolition pure and
sim ple for the peasants, while the right to hunt is .26 In this regard the
peasants are quite consistent: they separate sym bolization o f hierarchy from
m aterial burdens and com plain m ore bitterly about the latter. Few parish
cahiers concern them selves with such honorific rights as the claim on the
best seat in church or the m ost visible place in a procession and neme o f
those few demands abolition. N or do they take up sym bolic deference
patterns in general: w e find not a single parish cahier in our sam ple to have
dem anded their abolition, while a handful actually insist on their retention.
25. Pothier, for example, speaks of the cens as a “recognition of lordship" (Robert Pothier, Thtiti
des fiefs, avec un titre sur le cens [Orléans: Montaut, 1776], 2:378). Note the common lawyer’s
formula: “Cens portant tous droits censaux et seigneuriaux’’ (Saint Jacob, Posons de la Bourgogne
du Nord, 66).
26. Not that a sensitivity to the symbolism of honor is totally absent At the head of the bitter
denunciation of hunting rights composed by the parish of Marty-la-viDe {baiUiage of Paris-hors-les-
murs), stands a condemnation of its characteristics as a status marker: “Howgreat is the attachment
for an amusement which is only keenly felt because it is licit for some but illicit for others; for an
amusement which often raises the unreasoning beast above the fortune, the freedom and the life of
man, who God has given to the animal for master” (AP 4:678).
On the other hand, privileges maintaining the m ost visible status distinc
tions could be bitterly opposed by the peasants, if they w ere experienced as
severe financial burdens. The m ost detested seigneurial claim o f all in term s
o f the proportion o f rural docum ents insisting on abolition is the m onopoly
on milling. Pierre de Saint Jacob argues that the m onopoly on milling both
existed m ore w idely in the eighteenth century than the other form s o f
m onopoly and that, when present, it was harder to evade.27 Perhaps this
explains why it stands out am ong the m onopolies treated in the rural cahiers
for the frequency and the bitterness o f the discussions. The m onopoly on
ovens for baking bread, by way o f contrast, was continually threatened by
small, privately held oven s.28 In the Toulouse region som e lords w ere
abandoning this right and those w ho clung to it had to struggle ceaselessly
to en force i t 29
Noble Conservatism
Table 3 .5 presents the data on “ abolish” and “ maintain” for the nobility30
and the contrast with Table 3 .4 could not be m ore striking. For m ost
categories, unsilent noble assem blies have a substantial tendency to insist
(m maintaining the institution as is; for m ost categories shown on both
Tables 3 .4 and 3 .5 , the nobles correspondingly have a m arkedly low er
propensity than the Third Estate, let alone the parishes, to propose
abolition. N ote especially the differences with regard to the seigneurial
regim e in general: the nobility's propensity to preserve it m atches the Third
E state’s to elim inate it There are also several specific rights for which
there are m ore noble cahiers urging “maintain” than “ abolish. ” T here is
strong support for continued sym bolic distinction, an arena concerning
which, as w e have seen in Chapter 2, p. 47, the usually reticent nobility has
27. SaintJacob, Fqysans de la Bourgogne duNord, 420-22.

28. In one Burgundian village, the existence of no fewer than forty-six ovens became the
occasion of a bitter lawsuit between lord and community in 1781. See Hilton Root, Feasants and
King m Burgundy: Agrarian Foundations of French Absolutism (Berkeley and Los Angeles:
University of California Press, 1987), 189.
29. Jean Bastier, Laféodalité au siècle des lumierès dans la région de Toulouse, 1730-1790 (Puis:
Bibliothèque Nationale), 169-72. Renauklon, in the earlier of his treatises on seigneurial rights
(Joseph Renauldon, Traité historique etpratique des droits seigneuriaux [Paris: Despilly, 1765], 251),
wondered rhetorically whether in light of the widespread sense that the monopolies are “odious,” it
might not be a good idea to permit small ovens some restricted uses. He responded to his own
query by concluding that as desirable as liberty is, permitting such ovens would be contrary to the
lord’s interest, and would “give an excessive extension” to such liberty.
30. The noble propensity toward silence suggests examining institutions taken up in as few as
five texts. From the point of view of statistical reliability this would normally be an unwise
procedure, but the great thought that went into these documents suggests a more confident
evaluation of reliability thandoes the analysis of a typical survey item.
much to say. And note the preponderance o f "maintain” over “ abolish" for
the highly sym bolic hunting rights31 and for pigeon raising as w e ll32
Tocqueville, drawing on a reading o f the cahiers o f the nobility, argued that
the nobles’ com m itm ent to their status honor coexisted with a willingness
to abandon m onetary advantage: “ G enerally speaking, the nobility, while
abandoning many o f their beneficial rights, cling with anxiety and warmth to
those which are purely honorary. They want not only to preserve those
which they p ossess, but also to invent new ones. So conscious w ere they
that they w ere being dragged into the vortex o f dem ocracy: so terribly did
they dread perishing th ere.”33
Certainly Tocqueville might have found noble cahiers that claim ed to value
honor over m aterial advantage. Upon examination, how ever, som e o f these
claim s are at on ce follow ed by clarifications. Consider the second estate o f
Carcassonne. Their cahier tells us forthrightly that “ the nobility shall gener
ously offer sacrifices to pay o ff the governm ent debt and ease the sufferings
o f the p eop le.” H ow ever, they go on to tell us, in their province o f
Languedoc the m ost im portant direct tax, the taille, is “real” rather than
“personal,” follow ing the legal term inology o f the day. This m eant that those
exem pt from the taille, in Languedoc, w ere those holding “ noble land,”
rather than, as in northern France, those w ho w ere noble person s.34
T h erefore, these generous gentlem en reason, they, noble persons as they
are, have no tax privileges to abolish. M oreover, they point out, seigneurial
rights are assessed on land already taxed. It clearly follow s that the
revenues from cens and champart ought not to pay taxes. The peasants,
after all, on receiving land from “ the hand o f the seigneur” have already
agreed to bear all expenses. Having developed their argument to this point,
the nobles o f Carcassonne are now in a position to assert the proposition
toward which this line o f reasoning is heading: seigneurial rights are not to be
taxed, for that would be an infringem ent o f the sacred rights o f property.35
31. Garaud’s daim (J & v o lu tÙ M et propriété foncière, 163) that the noble cahim are “almost
unanimously” attached to the hunting rights is an exaggerated simplification. It is true that a bare
3% of those expressing views call for abolition; and, as will be seen below, there is also no support
for the option of indemnifying the seigneurs. But only 16% of the cahiers of the nobdity discuss this
right at aH (Garaud earlier had noted the frequent silence of the nobility [162].) Garaud also
overlooks the important complexity that only 25% of noble cahiers expressing views want to
maintain this privilege intact As we shaOshow below, there were many reform proposals.
32. Only a handful of noble cahiers take up either the right to raise rabbits or the right to fish. Of
these few, there isnone that calls for abolishing either, and some support for maintenance.
33. Tocqueville, OldRegime andRevolution, 26.
34. Marcel Marion, Les impôts directs sous tAncien Régime, principalement au XVIIIe siècle
(Geneva: Slatkine-Megariotis Reprints, 1974), 18-20.
35. What was this Carcassonne nobility prepared to sacrifice for the public interest? These
nobles, with a tone of generosity, will not protest against the vingtième tax (one of the Old Regime’s
attempts to get the privileged to pay something). When imposed in 1749, their cahier contends, it
was described as temporary. They, therefore, have every right to complain, but rather than argue
The invocation o f property as an argument against uncom pensated aboli

tion was rather com m on, in the cahiers o f the Third Estate as w ell as o f the
nobility (see Chapter 2, p. 34, and Chapter 9, p. 531). But the claim that
property rights forbade taxing seigneurial incom e was unusuaL36 But for all
its unusual features, this cahier teaches us to be hesitant about taking the
altruistic protestations at face value. If the reasoning o f the gentlem en o f
Carcassonne is unique, their fellow s o f Perche furnish a good exam ple o f a
m ore com m on position: "T h e nobility declares that since its pecuniary
privileges are those to which the order is the least attached, it shall sacrifice
them painlessly. It shall reserve, how ever, those announced in the report
to the Council by the D irector General o f Finances on D ec. 2 7 . . . and shall
reserve, m oreover, the sacred rights o f property. It declares form ally that
it cannot nor ought not to consent to any change which will bring about any
degradation to the person o f its m em bers or to the essen ce, the dignity and
the prerogatives o f its fiefs” (4 P 5:323). Evidently this painless sacrifice o f
pecuniary advantage is achieved by avoiding those that are too painfuL The
advantages in access to governm ent posts referred to in the Council’s
d ecree o f D ecem ber 27, 1788, are to be k e p t37 M ore strikingly, property
rights are not to be infringed.38 And if these aren’t reservations enough, the
nobles o f Perche refuse any degradation o f their persons. To a keen sense
o f honor, that could cover anything.
Tocqueville’s reading o f the cahiers is certainly borne out by many o f the
nobles’ general form ulations. It is less certain that it is an accurate summary
when one takes the reservations, qualifications, distinctions, and definitions
into account, particularly as these are often rather murky. The rhetorical
style o f sw eeping and highly generalized renunciation follow ed by extensive
qualification and careful definition that wholly altered the com m onsense
meaning o f the initial generalization was an im portant noble contribution to a
rhetorical style that blossom ed in the revolutionary legislatures. In this way
a portion o f the nobility managed to participate in a rather radical language
w hose detailed w orking-out would be far less sw eeping. T hey thus contrib
uted sim ultaneously to the public expression o f longing for rapid, sw eeping,
about the vmgtiim*s, the nobifity is “always ready to sacrifice its fortune and its Míefor the good of
the State” CAP2:530).
36. The relation of taxation and seigneurial rights is seen quite otherwise, for example, by the
parish of Marly-la-viDe in the bailliage of Paris-hor-les-murs. Inveighing against compensation for
the holders of detested rights, this document argues that by bearing the full weight of taxation, the
people have already adequately hdemnified the nobles for any losses suffered through abolition
CAP4:678).
37. Jean Egret discusses the background of this decree inLapri-rtvohilioHfrançaise, 1787-1788
(Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1962), 364-67.
38. As we shall show later, "property rights” were often construed very broadly by the nobility
and might even cover virtually the entire seigneurial regime. See p. 86, as wefl as Chapter 4,
p. 188, and Chapter 9, p. 531.
and total social transform ation, in a w ord, to revolutionary maximalism and,

at the sam e tim e, to the construction o f minimalist reform s designed to
change as little as possible and to constitute barriers to further change.
Partisans o f all political options could take heart or lose heart depending on
the selectivity with which they assim ilated this rhetoric. The language o f
revolutionary legislation on seigneurial rights from the fam ous session o f
August 4, 1789, w ell into 1792 was perm eated with this am biguity (see
Chapter 9).
Trying to discover precisely which rights the gentlem en o f Perche w ished
to shield under the umbrella o f property rights or those which their
colleagues o f Lim oges held to be “ purely honorific” (A P 3:569) turns out to
be a rather difficult m atter. Indeed, the absence o f specification perm itted
“ honorific” to expand as needed to cover lucrative claim s, all the while
maintaining a language o f sacrifice. Rather than search for explicit definitions
o f “ property” and “honorific" for the nobility, w e can m ore easily see in
practice which rights the noble cahiers seek to defend and which to elim inate.
L et us return to Table 3 .5 . First o f all noble com m itm ent to honor is
indeed quite evid en t The strongest com m itm ent to m aintenance is precisely
in the area o f sym bolization o f status distinction. T here are also a num ber
o f incom e-producing rights that attract m ore demands for abolition than
m aintenance: this is true for the dues on fairs and m arkets, the com pulsory
labor services, and the seigneurial tolls.39 And the handful o f noble cahiers
that take up serfdom have a very strong abolitionist elem en t It is not the
case, how ever, that the preponderance o f noble sentim ent— am ong those
assem blies that took a public position, that is— favors abolishing all incom e-
producing rights. N otice the hints o f support for champart and mutation
fe e s.40 T h ese w ere not m erely incom e-producing but w ere am ong the m ore
39. Tocqueville wildly exaggerates when he asserts on the basis of his study of the noble cahiers:
“AD the cahiers demand that corvées be definitively abolished. A majority of bailiwicks desire the
rights of banality and toUbe made redeemable“ (Tocqueville, OldRegime andRevolution, 265). Only
a handful of noble cahiers even mention the banalités at aD, to mention only the most striking error.
TocqueviDe seems to have completely missed the significance of the silence of the nobility.
Inadequate attention to noble reticence also distorts the picture painted in the path-breaking work
of Nikolai Karéiew, Les Paysans et la question paysanne en France dans le dernier quart du XVIIIe
siècle (Paris: V. Giard and E. Brière, 1899). In his generaDy insightful discussion of the noble
cahiers, he writes, for example, that “the nobility unanimously declares itself for the preservation
of the right to hunt“ (425); there is no indication to the reader of how unusual any discussions at aD
of this right actuaDy were.
40. Our discussion oí these rights as material exactions or symbolic distinctions does not imply
that these categories are at aDexclusive. As Pierre de Saint Jacob points out, even as lucrative a
claim as the mutation fees has a significant symbolic aspect It showed the domination of the
seigneur weD beyond his own domain land. As a restriction on the free alienability of land, one of
the critical aspects of any modem notion of property, what coukl be a more powerful reminder of
the incompleteness of peasant freedom than lods et ventes? (What that is, other than the even more
restrictive—and even more hated—retrait?) (SaintJacob, Paysans de la Bourgogne duNord, 65).
lucrative rights. Perhaps few noble cahiers dared in the atm osphere o f the
spring o f 1789 to defend their naked interests, but the relatively lucrative
rights seem m ore likely to be defended than renounced, when m entioned at
all (and there are very few m entions). The nobles o f Perche may painlessly
sacrifice its "pecuniary privileges” ; sacrificing som ething as specific as
champart is another, and m ore painful, m atter entirely.
M ore revealing, perhaps, is the strong support for the retention o f the
seigneurial courts, one o f the rights that m ore than a handful o f noble
assem blies w ere willing to discuss. One might claim that the provision o f a
visible public service, som etim es accom panied by special m arks o f distinc
tion41 falls within the "sym bolic” group.42 The nobles o f Lim oges m ount such
a defense o f the right o f ju stice. T hey tell us that “ the order o f the
nobility willingly renounces its pecuniary privileges.” The "purely honorific,”
how ever, are to be conserved, for "it is essential that the nobles hold fast
to the distinctions necessary for a m onarchy.” T h ese distinctions, indeed,
support “ the liberty o f the people, the respect due the sovereign and the
authority o f the law s.” And what do the gentlem en have in mind as “purely
honorific?” Am ong other claim s, they insist “ that seigneurial courts and
other honorific rights o f the seigneurs be conserved and augm ented.”43 But
the seigneur's court also served rather w idely as the linchpin o f the system ,
“ the soul o f the fie f,” in Saint Jacob’s expression.44 It provided an institutional
mechanism for com pelling peasant com pliance.45
41. A seigneur with the right of “high justice,” which once upon a time meant the right to try
people for their lives, might erect a gallows on his land, a more elaborate gallows for a higher
ranking lord. See Joseph Renauldon, Dictionnaire desfiefs et droits seigneuriaux utiles et honorifiques
(Paris: Delalain, 1788), 1:478.
42. Discussions of seigneurial courts tend to be found innoble cahiers thatalso devote proportion
ately more space to unambiguously honorific rights; there is no such association withunambiguously
lucrative ones; see Chapter 4.
43. AP 3:570. The other “purely honorific” rights itemized: bearing arms, entry into military
careers, being listed on a separate tax role for a specially named tax, a bit of land.
44. Paysans de la Bourgogne duNord, 407.
45. But not everywhere. Basher's exhaustive study of 55 seigneurial courts around Toulouse
shows almost no cases in which the lord used them to enforce payment of dues (although they did
serve as an arena to protect hunting rights). It appears to have been too easy for the defendants to
appeal such judgments for it to have been worthwhile to bring the case before the lord’s own court
at aL And in the Vannes region, cases involving a local lord automatically went to a higher court in
Brittany's unusual hierarchy of seigneurial courts. A seigneurial court, but not one’s own, heard the
lord's case (at least incases involving Brittany's distinctive tenure arrangement, domainecongéablé).
The more usual judgment of historians has been wefl stated in Robert Forster's detailed studies of
estate management In Aunis he finds the courts to be “significant instruments for a family of
domain-builders” by enforcing retrait, the collection of arrears, and the seizure of uncultivated land.
Around Toulouse, unlike Basher, he finds the seigneurial courts “akey institutioninthe maintenance
of the noble’s interests in general and of the seigneurial system in particular”; see Bastier, Féodalité
au siècle des lumières, 123-25, 168-69; Timothy J. A. Le Gofi, Vannes and Its Region: A Study of
Town and Country m Eighteenth-Century France (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981), 279; Robert
If there w ere som e material claim s the nobles w ished to defend (som e
tim es by cloaking them in honor), there w ere som e sym bolic ones they did
n o t T here was no enthusiasm for defending those tw o ancient ritualized
acknowledgm ents o f entering into possession o f a fief: “ fealty and hom age”
and “ avowal and enum eration.” Status distinctions am ong lords w ere like
serfdom in having no noble support w hatsoever for unaltered preservation.
The on ce elaborate and em otionally intense cerem ony by which the vassal
declared him self the man o f another man and the detailed accounting o f the
feudal holding w ere w eaker in the eighteenth century, when observed at all,
and altogether devoid o f their form er m oral intensity.46 But it w as not
m erely their institutional feebleness that made the nobles uninterested in
their defense. We suggest, rather, that the eighteenth century’s m ost
celebrated critic o f the entire seigneurial system , B oncerf, was (Hi ta rget
He pointed out that these rights w ere disliked by m ost o f the seigneurs,
because they them selves had to acknow ledge the overlordship o f their ow n
suzerains.47 Few noble assem blies took up (see Chapter 2, p. 61), and none
supported, an elaborated hierarchy.48 B y con trast the noble cahiers o f 1614
w ere perm eated with a vision o f a society both corporate and elaborately
stratified. In 1614, a typical docum ent organized its grievances in articles
that dealt with “ clergy,” “nobility,” and so on. This corporate structure
survived in som e cahiers in 1789; in many others it had been displaced by
“constitution,” “ agriculture,” and other categories that cut across social
hierarchies and within which reasoned program s w ere elaborated. The
Forster, Merchants, Landlords, Magistrates: The Depont Family m Eighteenth Century France
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980), 88-89; and The Nobility of Tbulouse m the
Eighteenth Century: A Social and Economic Shaft (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press,
1960), 29.
46. Oneighteenth-century ideas of hierarchy, see Yves Durand, Lesfem ien généraux anXVIlIe
siècle (Paris: Presses Universitaires de Fiance, 1971).
47. Pierre-François Boncerf, Les inconvéniens des droits féodaux (London: Ydade, 1776), 67.
The ecclesiastical corporations of Angers, for example, were appalled when the count of Provence
insisted in 1774, that he be renderedfoi et hommageand aveu et dénombrement and went to court to
enforce his wilL In the late 1780s, the advisers of the duke of Orléans successfully urged him to
reassert his daim to demonstration of fealty from his vassals (so as not to be outshone by the king
and his brothers). But the Revolution intervened, and the duke became Philippe-Egalité instead.
See John McManners, French Ecclesiastical Society under the Ancien Régime: A Study ofAngers m
the Eighteenth Century (Manchester Manchester University Press, 1960), 119-20; Beatrice F.
Hyslop, L'Apanage de Philippe Egalité, Duc d’Orléans (1785-1791) (Paris; Société des Etudes
Robespierristes, 1965), 62-63, 167-68.
48. What the nobility chose not to defend, the southwestern villagers of CasteKerrus were willing
to let them keep. In tine with the pervasive peasant focus on material exactions, and relative
indifference to the symbols oí the seigneurial order, their cahiercalls for the abolition of compulsory
labor and monopolies and the right to buy out "the payments they owe annually to their lord, and
shall only leave him the pre-eminence of his fief.” Do we read this as generosity or as derisive
Gascon wit? See Daniel Ligou, ed., Cahiers de doléances du tiers état dupays etjugerie de Riviére-
Verdunpour les étatsgénéraux de 1789 (Gap: Imprimerie Louis-Jean, 1961), 53-54.
sense o f the m onarch em pow ered by G od was largely (but not totally)
displaced by the executive w hose pow ers derive from a con tract And the
sense o f gradation within the nobility has all but vanished.48 We see here the
lack o f com m itm ent to a truly hierarchical society, perhaps the consequence
o f the extensive representation o f the lesser nobility in the assem blies that
drafted the cahiers. O r perhaps this is a sym ptom o f that penetration o f
dem ocratic thought into the nobility which Tocqueville regarded as under
mining their capacity to rule.4 50 The nobles o f Përigueux explicitly insist (Hi
9
“ the essential equality o f the nobility which may not be divided into several
classes.” They go on: “w e are pleased to consider the princes o f the blood
as the first o f our order and w e recognize the functions o f the peers in
parlement but w e shall never recognize their preem inence and still less their
pretentions.”51
Noble Defense and Third Estate Attack

How do the nobles justify the seigneurial regim e when they propose to
preserve it? O ften, to be sure, they do not justify it but m erely state their
demand as when the nobles o f Lim oges assert their claim s to honorific rights
(AP 3:570). Unlike the other form s o f noble reticen ce, this is not especially
distinctive; the Third Estate and parishes often similarly om it any argum ents
49. Ludmila Pimenova, “La noblesse à la veffle de la Révolution," in La grande Rtvohdàm

française (Moscow; Editions Naouka, 1989), 50-55. See also Gilbert Shapiro and John Markoff,
Revolutionary Demands: A ContentAnalysis ofthe Cahiers deDoliances of1789 (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 1997), chap. 19.
50. The notion of a specifically noble egalitarianism can be occasionally glimpsed much earlier in
the century. Insofar as the eighteenth-century nobility produced a coherent defense for privilege in
a democratic world without a God fixing each in his place, it was BoulainviUiers’s attempt to found
present-day social distinctions in the barbarian conquest of Gaul In his view, the free Germanic
conquerors were profoundly egalitarian; the creation of distinctions within the nobility was a
disgusting outcome of royal despotism. On the other hand, the effort to distinguish more genuine
nobles from newcomers kept BoulamviDiers himself reinventing internal gradations, as shown in
Harold Ellis’s dose survey of his political ideas. The rare moments when nobles spoke collectively
outside of the usual institutions suggests some support for such ideas. In the absence of anEstates-
General after 1614, nobles occasionally assembled themselves in moments of crisis, a practice that
continued into the early eighteenth century. The last such mobilization in 1717 gave voice to an
intra-noble fraternal egalitarianism; see Harold A. Ellis, BoulamviUiers and the French Monarchy:
Aristocratic Iblitics in Early Eighteenth-Century France (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988);
Jean-Dominique Lassaigne, Les assemblies de la noblesse de France aux dix-septiime et dix-hwtüme
siicles (Paris: Cujas, 1965), 143-46. See abo François Furet and Mona Ozouf, “Deux légitimations
historiques de la société française au XVÜIe siècle: Mabiy et BoutainviBiers,” Annales: Economies,
Sociétés, Civilisations 34 (1979): 438-50.
51. AP 5:341. This cahier plainly embraces the vision erfan internally fraternal nobility, nonethe
less distinguished from the commoners, found in the thinking of Boutainvilliers, rather than the
finely graded hierarchy whose pinnacle was the monarch that was championed by the princes of
the blood.
in support o f their insistence (Hi abolition. W hen the nobles discuss the
seigneurial rights as an aggregate, how ever, they d o tend to put forth an
explicit rationale. A study o f these claim s discerns tw o distinct lines o f
defense that assem blies o f the nobility evidently held (or at least hoped) to
be persuasive. First, the nobles may appeal to an im age o f a hierarchical and
m onarchical social order in which distinctions o f status are vital m atters o f
honor. The nobility o f Lim oges, for exam ple, insist on “the distinctions
necessary in a m onarchy” and then go on to stress particularly the right to
bear arm s, seigneurial justice and other honorific seigneurial rights as w ell
as appearing on a separate tax role (AP 3 :5 6 9 -7 0 ). This argum ent tends to
conflate noble and seigneurial prerogatives. Past service, especially o f a
m ilitary variety, and sacrifice, especially o f blood, may be invoked. Such
language suffuses the introductory paragraphs o f the cahier o f the nobility o f
V illers-C otterets, for exam ple (AP 6:189). M uch m ore com m only, the
nobles may appeal to property as an ultimate value, not to be encroached
on by the state nor usurped by the avaricious. The discourse o f property
occu rs in contesting arbitrary state pow er to seize one’s person in unmoti
vated im prisonm ent or one’s goods in unconsented taxation. The nobility o f
Saintes enum erate several essential laws, the first o f which “ will assure our
personal liberty and our properties.” Such a law, in their view , simultane
ously abolishes the royal practice o f arbitrary im prisonm ent through lettres
de cachet and protects seigneurial rights. The second basic law bars taxation
without the free consent o f the E states-G eneral (AP 5:665). The nobility
som etim es defined property with som e care to include seigneurial rights.52
For the discourse o f honor to cover the entire seigneurial regim e, the
category o f specifically honorific rights had to expand and the incom e
generating aspects o f particular rights ignored. For the discourse o f property
to cover the entire seigneurial regim e, a contractual and voluntary aspect
needed to be im puted to social relationships held by critics to be either
inherently or historically coerced (see Chapter 9).
The Third Estate show s its own sense o f a good case when it justifies its
attacks. The seigneurial regim e is som etim es attacked for its harm to the
public interest, particularly in its injury to agriculture. The argum ent o f
utility— or rather disutility— som etim es runs quite deep. The Third E state
o f Nem ours adopted a docum ent in which an extensive discussion o f
seigneurial rights is a subsection o f a broad treatm ent “ o f the adm inistration
o f agriculture,” itself a section o f a chapter on “laws bearing on the
adm inistration o f labor” (AP 4 :1 9 1 -2 0 7 ). And if the nobles som etim es point
to the needs o f a m onarchical system to align the lords with the forces o f
light, the Third Estate has its counterim age o f darkness. The noble assertion
o f honor was countered by the Third’s depiction o f dishonor. In its rem inis
52. For example, nobles of Samtonge, AP 5:665.

cen ce o f ancient servitude, the seigneurial system em bodies the vestiges o f

barbarism .53 And w hatever there once might have been to say on behalf o f
these lordly prerogatives, these justifications have evaporated. Com pulsory
labor service was a particularly conspicuous exam ple o f barbarism to the
Third E state. In Gien it was held to be am ong the “ odious rem ains o f the
tyranny o f the pow erful” (A P 3:285). The three orders o f V illiers-la-
M ontagne agreed that it w as “an intolerable vice” (A P 2:246).
The w eight o f these considerations varies with the nature o f the particular
right in question. With regard to its honorific distinctiveness, the nobility is
especially apt to assert the requirem ents o f a m onarchical constitution,54
thereby adhering to a central thesis o f M ontesquieu.55 The nobles o f
Nivernais et D onzois add that being publicly singled out by virtue o f clear
and visible distinctions m akes nobles feel they m ust live up to the qualities
o f their ancestors (A P 4:253). (T he Third Estate o f Etam pes, as if replying
tongue-in-cheek, suggest the possibility o f a new and distinctive em blem for
nobles to wear— nobility, how ever, being redefined as a nonhereditary
reward for public service; AP 3:284). The Third Estate did not, any m ore
than the nobility, reject a “m onarchical constitution,” but they did not
with any frequency claim that seigneurial rights and especially honorific
distinctions are essential in a m onarchy.56 For its part, the nobility did not
mount a defense o f barbarism— although as w e shall argue below , their
sense o f them selves as w arriors is im plicit in many o f their texts— but
neither did they defend the seigneurial regim e against this charge.
A defense couched in term s o f honor was virtually an invitation to an
attack couched in term s o f scorn. The m ore com m on defense in term s o f
property appealed to the very sam e values being drawn on by som e o f the
fiercest critics o f the seigneurial regim e. On the level o f detailed debate on
particular rights, how ever, the gulf in discourse is so great that attackers
and defenders som etim es appear to be speaking o f distinct institutions that
happen to bear the sam e name. W hen the Third Estate dem anded the
abolition o f the exclusive right to bear arm s, it is clear they w ere concerned
about the protection o f crops and the claim s o f self-d efen se.57 The Third
Estate o f the border area o f Perpignan, for exam ple, wanted its strong
53. Vitry-le-Françoîs, AP 6:219.

54. Arras, AP 2. The noble defense of status markers as property is not unknown, however
(see, e.g., Nobles of Meaux, AP 3:726).
55. De fEs¡mt des Lois (Paris: Société Les Belles Lettres, 1950), book 5, chapter 9.
56. The Third Estate of Digne does, however, argue atypically that “in a great State, it is
necessary not to confound ranks. Distinctions must not be destroyed. The national assembly must
abolish afl servitude and everything that contrasts with the rights and the dignity of man and citizen.
Ranks may and must be conserved without any element of humiliation." Nóte that the emphasis
here is on the preservation of the dignity of subordinate strata within the necessary framework of
rank. This was hardly a widespread noble concern; see AP 3:348.
57. Examples: Pbnthieu, AP 5:441; BaiUeul, AP 2:177.
88 THE ABOLITION OP FEUDALISM
tradition o f self-protection reaffirm ed (4 P 5:376). The nobles w ere caught

up with a different m atter entirely: their sense o f honor. The rich sym bol
that they insist should be exclusively theirs is the sw ord. Their docum ents
are less inclined but not com pletely disinclined to talk o f firearm s.5859But if
the possession o f firearm s might not make the gentlem en o f the era o f Louis
XVI feel them selves to be with Roland at Roncesvalles, sw aggering with
sw ord on hip was even less consequential to those who w orried about
w olves and birds and thieves. The “ right to bear a rm s/’ then, hardly
connoted the sam e “ arm s” to all participants in 1789.58 W ere the right to
bear arm s the only point at issue, it is not difficult to imagine a com pro
m ise— if one is willing to assum e that the public discourse is the only reality.
That at least a part o f the Third Estate was eager for a form ula that might
preserve the honor o f the lords is suggested by the discussion o f seigneurial
ju stice on the part o f the notables o f Forcalquier. A fter proposing the
abolition o f the lord’s courts in no uncertain term s, they reconsider. “ If,”
they indicate, “ som eone proposes the means to conciliate the dignity o f the
fiefs and the tranquility o f the vassals, the deputies m ust not refuse to adopt
them .” T hey then suggest consideration o f several options, without urging
adoption o f any o f them (4 P 3:331). T hey are in short prepared to grant the
lords their public esteem , if no one is thereby iqjured.
Indemnification
If neither “ abolish” nor “m aintain,” what else might be proposed? One
im portant interm ediary position, com m only expressed by the verb racheter,
was aim ed at m ollifying many parties. Under this proposal, a seigneurial
right would be elim inated upon paym ent o f a suitable indem nity to the lord.
Such a suggestion responded to many desires: to relieve one social class o f
a burden without damaging the interests o f another; to create the sense o f
change while delaying or perhaps blocking it; to rationalize rural France
without damaging the present proprietors. O f course, it did not respond to
the desire to hold fast expressed by a part o f the nobility, nor the desire to
clear the system away, expressed by a larger part o f the Third E state and
an even larger part o f the peasantry.
Although som e historians, like A lfred Cobban, w hose argum ent I consider
58. Nor, for that matter, did the Third Estate always insist on firearms. Avesnes, for
“ADproprietors shaDbe permitted to destroy game without firearms" (AP 2:153).
59. On August 7, 1789, the bishop of Chartres proposed amending the decree on abolishing
feudal rights to the effect that game could only be destroyed with “innocent weapons.” The bishop
never elucidated this curious concept; Us suggestion was greeted with laughter andhe dropped out
of the debate CAP8:358).
below (see also Chapter 10, p. 594) have seen the indem nification proposal
as little m ore than a sm okescreen to conceal the preservation o f seigneurial
rights, it is im portant to see how radical, in the eyes o f som e, the notion
appeared when it was advocated a dozen years before the Revolution.
B on cerf’s pamphlet o f 1776 on “ The Disadvantages o f Feudal Rights” had
argued for such an indem nification, at a high rate, considerably m ore
generous to the lords than the legislation eventually adopted by the National
Assem bly proved to b e.60 Even this was far too radical for the Paris
Parlem ent, which ordered the w ork publicly tom and burnt, an act that
ensured the brochure’s celebrity.61 The pariem entary decree left little doubt
about how threatening was even such a generous indem nification: “ One is
tem pted to the view that there is a secret party, an underground agent,
w ho is trying to shake the foundations o f the state through internal shocks.
What is happening resem bles those volcanos which, having announced
them selves with subterranean noises and a sequence o f trem ors, end in a
sudden eruption that covers everything around with a flaming torrent o f
ruins, ashes and lava thrust up from the furnace in the bow els o f the
earth.”62 The precise fear o f the m agistrates, the decree goes on to make
d ear, w as that such a m easure would provide a focu s to m obilize peasants
who m ight then go far beyond B on cerf’s ostensibly lim ited purposes:
“ vassals will not hesitate to rise against their lords as will the people against
their sovereign” (70).
H istorians have often noted that the parish cahiers som etim es called for
com pensation to the lords for the loss o f their rights and som etim es
favored abolition pure and sim ple. There has been, how ever, no sustained
exploration o f w hether it was only certain rights that tended to attract the
m ore m oderate demand. The proportion o f parish and o f Third E state
grievances calling for the abolition (in som e fashion) o f a seigneurial right
was about the sam e, 44% ; they differed in the proportion favoring a sim ple
term ination o f the lord's claim as opposed to an indemnity (see Table 3 .1 ).
The advocacy o f indem nification has been understood in quite different
w ays. The core o f A lfred Cobban’s argument that the revolutionary legisla
tures w ere at one with the nobility in their resistance to the dismantling o f
the seigneurial regim e (due to their sharing in the ow nership o f seigneurial
60. Boucerf proposed compensating the lords at 50 or 60 times the annual value of their rights.
The indemnification rate established in May 1790 for regular annual dues was, depending on the
particular right, set at 20 or 25 tines the annual yield (Boocerf, Les mamvétœns des droitsféodaux,
11; AP 15:365-66).
61. Doutas Dakin, Utrgot m i the Anden Régime m Fima (New York: Octagon Books,
1965), 247-48.
62. Arrêt de la courdeparlementquicondamne tme brochure intitulée: Les mamvéniens des droits
ftodmx (London: Wade, 1776), 66.
rights)63 lies in his attem pt to present their distinctive advocacy o f indemni

fication as a sm okescreen behind which they confidently expected to pre
serve the system they m erely pretended to attack. Cobban sees indemnifi
cation as a fraud: since the peasants could not pay, indem nification would
carry the rhetoric o f abolition but the reality o f conservation. Anatoly A do,
(xi the other hand, sees the indem nification option as a com prom ise many
peasant com m unities w ere willing to accept, a com prom ise that would
elim inate the seigneurial structures without rupturing the fragile unity o f an
"anti-feudal” coalition that included even relatively conservative sectors o f
the bourgeoisie.64
The statistical evidence suggests both view s need considerable m odifica
tion. If Cobban is correct that the essen ce o f indem nification is an elite trick,
there ought to be virtually no peasant support yet 27% o f parish assem blies
proposed indem nifying at least one righ t The m ere fact o f significant, if
m inority, rural support show s that indem nification could be advocated for
reasons other than sugarcoating an essentially conservative position.
W hereas a few villagers, such as those em ployed in collectin g them for the
lord,65 might have had a pocketbook m otive for maintaining seigneurial
rights, it is hard to see this group as obtaining a recognition o f those
interests by their fellow s in m ore than one assem bly in four. On the
other hand, if three-quarters o f villages had no indem nification dem ands
w hatsoever, what happens to Ado’s consensus on a m oderate com prom ise?
If w e exam ine grievances that take up the seigneurial rights as an aggregate,
w e are led to similar reservations. O f cahiers that discuss “ the seigneurial
rights” collectively, one in four calls for indem nification: too many by far
to see indem nification as m erely an elite fraud but rather short o f a
com prom ise consensus.
Further progress on understanding indem nification may com e from going
beyond the seigneurial rights as an inseparable aggregate and asking
w hether those villagers w ho sought com prom ise w ere equally likely to
em brace indem nification regardless o f the specific righ t Table 3 .6 show s
that Third Estate enthusiasm was substantially greater than that o f the
parishes for alm ost every single righ t But w e also see that it w as far m ore
likely to be advocated with regard to certain seigneurial rights than oth ers.66
63. Cobban’s summary claim with regard to “the men who drew up the cahiers in the towns and
the members of the tiers état in the National Assembly” is that “there can be no doubt of their
opposition to the abolition of seigneurial dues and rights” (SocialInterpretation, 43).
64. Anatoly V. Ado, Krestianskoe dvizhenie vo Frantsii vo vremia velikoi bunhamoi revoliutm
kontsaXVIII veka (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo Moskovskovo Universiteta, 1971), 97.
65. Jacques Dupâquier, “Structures sociales et cahiers de doléances. L’exemple du Yexm
français,” Annales historiques de la Révolutionfrançaise 40 (1968): 438.
66. Marcel Garaud’s nonquantitative discussion of the cahiers is sensitive to the different
treatment of different seigneurial rights, but he errs in asserting that “the Third Estate comes out
very generally in favor of indemnification” (Garaud, Révolution etpropriétéfoncière, 162). We see, in
It is alm ost nonexistent in connection with the right to bear arm s and the
seigneurial courts; it is quite unusual in connection with the recreational
privileges. It is m ost com m only em ployed, by both the parishes and the
Third E state, in the area o f periodic dues, and, for both groups, it is urged
at an interm ediate frequency in connection with seigneurial m onopolies,
dues on property transfers, com pulsory labor services, and serfdom .
We often conceive o f peasants as acting on their em otions, as rising in
anger when not subdued by fear. I believe som e fresh light may be shed on
the entire indem nification question by the sim ple act o f addressing a
cognitive issue; instead o f focusing on which rights w ere m ore or less hated,
let us ask for which ones it was plausible to com pute lump-sum m onetary
equivalents. If a m onetary equivalent could be assigned with relatively little
ambiguity then indem nification was at least a conceivable m echanism for
com prom ise. To the extent that such a valuation would necessarily seem
arbitrary, the plausibility o f any figure proposed by way o f com prom ise
would be reduced. Table 3 .6 show s quite clearly that som e rights w ere not
candidates for indem nification at aU, while others w ere so seen by a
significant rural segm ent, although generally a m inority. Rural enthusiasm
for indem nification varied enorm ously depending upon the particular sei
gneurial right in question, from a nearly tw o-thirds m ajority in the case o f
cens down to no support w hatsoever with regard to the seigneurial courts
or som e o f the recreational privileges. The m ere fact o f such selectivity in
advocacy o f indem nification would be hard to reconcile with Cobban’s
position at all and suggests som e m odification o f A do's.
The periodic dues w ere the class o f rights m ost likely to attract peasant
proposals for indem nification. Indeed, with the exception o f "m onopolies in
general,” no other right attracted so much support for the paym ent o f an
indem nity as the least enticing o f the periodic dues. By virtue o f being an
annual paym ent, w ere not the periodic dues that class o f rights w hose value
was m ost precisely determ inable? We may go fu rth er am ong periodic
paym ents, surely those paid in cash w ere easier to assign a cash value than
those paid as a portion o f the crop. N ote that the cens, a cash paym ent, was
head and shoulders above the rest, while champart, a paym ent in kind,
fact, from Table 3.1 that “abolish” is generally more common for the Third Estate; and Tables 3.4
and 3.6 compared show it tobe more common for 20 of the 26 institutions listed. “Abolish” is even
about as common a demand for the seigneurial regime in general as is “indemnify.” Garaud’s error
is far from uniquely his. A similar judgment of Third Estate opinion is common among historians.
Certainly sentiment for indemnification was strong but, on the evidence of the cahiers, Georges
Lefebvre goes too far when he suggests that “until July 14, the bourgeoisie had neither the time
nor the taste to attack the tithe and the feudal rights” and that there was no intention of conceding
to the peasants an abolition without compensation (an opinion in which he was joined by Alfred
Cobban). See Lefebvre, “La Révolution française et les paysans,” 343, 355; Cobban, Social
Interpretation, 37.
Thble 3 .6 . Parish and Third Estate Documents Demanding that Seigneurial Rights B e
Ended with Compensation Paid to the Seigneur (% )
Right* Parishes Third Estate
Periodic dues
Certs 64% (17) 57% (28)
Champart 21 (92) 60 (61)
Cens et rentes 31 (86) 59 (37)
Periodic dues in general 25 (86) 55 (30)
M iscellaneous periodic dues 29 (38) 9 (22)
Seigneurial m onopolies
M onopoly on ovens 7 (39) 29 (50)
M onopoly on milling 2 (128) 25 (70)
M onopoly on wine press 7 (37) 31 (44)
M onopolies in genual 21 (90) 43 (103)
Assessm ents on econom ic activity
Seigneurial tolls 2 (61) 27 (117)
Dues on fairs and markets 14 (17) 33 (45)
Property Transfer rights
Dues on property transfers (lods et ventes) 12 (60) 12 (49)
Retrait 14 (36) 0 (48)
Justice
Seigneurial courts in general 0 (104) 10 (90)
Seigneurial courts, m iscellaneous 0 (41) 0 (56)
Recreational privileges
Hunting rights 4 (97) 2 (107)
Right to raise pigeons 0 (152) 0 (96)
Right to raise rabbits 0 (35) 0 (39)
Fishing rights 8 (17) 0 (24)
Symbolic deference
Right to bear arms 0 (27) 0 (41)
Serfdom
Mainmorte 0 (9) 30 (36)
Serfdom in general 2 (18) 15 (26)
Other
Com pulsory labor services 7 (102) 32 (109)
M iscellaneous right 9 (54) 27 (79)
Regime in general 25 (112) 22 (91)
'Rights discussed it at least 20 Parish or 20 Third Estate cahiers (and at least 5 of each).
trailed. M ixed categories (m iscellaneous paym ents that could assum e eith er
form and periodic paym ents as a w hole, which include both) w ere interm e
diary.
A t the other extrem e, consider the difficulties facing anyone w ho w ished
to estim ate the m onetary cost to the peasants or the m onetary incom e to
the lord represented by som e o f the rights. The right to raise pigeons o r
rabbits, to hunt, or to fish seem particularly difficult to assign a value to

which all parties could assen t It is hard to imagine that the very attem pt to
set a price on such rights would not itself provoke endless con flict The right
to bear arm s seem s utterly hopeless: what did it cost the peasants— and how
to reckon in quantitative term s the deprivation to the lord’s pride o f losing
the exclusive prerogative to sw agger, sw ord at side? It is telling that not a
single peasant cahier o f the 748 in our sam ple suggested indem nification
here.
The costs to the peasants and the gains to the lord o f seigneurial courts
also seem quite difficult to summarize as a m onetary figure. On the
peasant side the costs included unfavorable decisions when the lord was an
interested party— but there w ere benefits when ju stice was dispensed by
som eone with som e know ledge o f com munity life. The rural com munity
might w ell w eigh the costs o f travel (and consequent lost tim e) that use o f
the m ore distant royal court entailed. The lord had to consider the possible
value o f the court in enforcing his other seigneurial claim s against costs o f
legal personnel, courtroom , and perhaps a jail. Both sides had the esteem
due the lord as provider o f justice to w eigh as w ell. If seen this way, there
is little surprise in seeing that no (me supported indem nification.
Now consider seigneurial claim s that involved a paym ent, but one ex
tracted at irregular intervals. One might imagine assessing the cost to the
peasant and to the lord, but the variation in the annual burden might w ell
make agreem ent difficult M utation fees and dues on fairs and m arkets had
but a small body o f rural support for indem nification. The value o f the
seigneurial m onopolies seem s calculable but with considerable difficulty;
note that there was som e support for the general notion o f indem nifying
m onopolies but that there was only very slight support for indem nifying the
holder o f any particular m onopoly. The idea o f indem nification for m onopolies
may have seem ed attractive to som e, perhaps appealing to the spirit o f
com prom ise as Ado suggests; but when one tries to im agine, concretely,
how to indem nify the holder o f a specific m onopoly, the intellectual difficulty
appears form idable. By the sam e token, about one-fourth o f those w ho take
up the seigneurial rights in general suggested indem nification as the path to
dismantling the w hole structure; yet apart from the periodic dues, no
specific rights seem to lend them selves so easily to this proposal.
For the m ost part, then, the data are consonant with the rather sim ple
proposal that the plausibility o f a m onetary evaluation w as critical for rural
support for indem nification. But a few seigneurial rights do not seem to fit
this pattern. Retrait perm itted the lord to substitute him self for the pur
chaser when a m em ber o f the rural com munity sold land; it is hard to see
why it should have attracted indem nification proposals about as frequently
as mutation fees when it surely would have been harder to quantify. The
ease o f evaluation also does not explain why seigneurial tolls did not attract
indem nification proposals when they seem about as easy to evaluate as

som e o f the others; nor are the distinctions m ade am ong our m onopoly
categories d ea r.67
In spite o f such reservations, how ever, the pattern o f rural support for
indem nification certainly suggests a com prom ise, but hardly one em braced
with w idespread passion. M ore than one-third o f parish cahiers advocate
this option only for the cens. Given any difficulty confronting the m onetary
valuation o f a particular right, the support for indem nification fell precipi
tously. Peasant support for com prom ise may have been there, as Ado has
argued, but on the evidence o f the cahiers it was lim ited. But even a weak
rural advocacy for com prom ise may have been an im portant straw at which
a revolutionary leadership, hoping for d vil peace, could grasp. The public
positions taken in the assem blies o f village France in the spring may w ell
have encouraged the National Assem bly to believe that it could get away
with a detailed body o f legislation cm the seigneurial rights in which indemni
fication was a significant mainstay.
The urban notables w ere dearly m ore enthusiastic about indem nification
than the country people. In 14 o f the 25 categories, the Third E state’s
proportion is larger, often much larger. Indeed, Table 3.1 show ed it is in
their support for indem nification that the Third Estate cahiers differ m ost
sharply in their program from the parish texts. A country lawyer represent
ing his parish at the bailliage assem bly in Ploërm el recalled in his m em oirs
how he first gained and then lost the support o f other rural delegates in the
course o f debating the cahier. An initial denunciation o f privilege brought
him considerable notice and made him a front-runner for election to the
E states-G eneral; a later, judidous speech on behalf o f indem nification as a
com prom ise could not even be finished in the face o f shouts, threats, and
denched fists.68 The peasant-notable difference over indem nification w as to
have great consequence for the subsequent relationship o f revolutionary
legislature and revolutionary village (see Chapter 8 ). This difference is the
obverse o f the peasants' greater enthusiasm for abolition, pure and sim ple,
discussed above. Ànd why not? Som e leading m em bers o f the Third Estate
w ere them selves seigneurs,69 for whom indem nification w as a w ay to
67. Perhaps the urban notables differed a bit from the peasantry in their perceptions of the
feasible. While generally paralleling the parishes, the Third Estate cahiers have moderate support
for indemnifying tolls and none for retrait, thereby more closely approximating the ease of
calculability than do the parishes. And perhaps they are more confident about indemnities for
champarte
68. Roger Dupuy, “Les émeutes anti-féodales de Haute-Bretagne (janvier 1790 et janvier 1791):
meneurs improvisés ou agitateurs politisés,” in Jean Nicolas, ed., Mouvements populaires et
conscience sociale, XVIe-XIXe siècles ffaris: Maloine, 1985), 452.
69. A point discussed with great vigor by Cobban, Social Interpretation, 27, 43-48. We shall
consider his thesis shortly.
elim inate seigneuriabsm (and thereby inarch into the m odem w orld) at
minimal personal cost (or even gain if the indem nification term s w ere set
high enough).70 The urban notables, m oreover, w hose concern for the
financial situation o f the state was far greater than w as the peasants’,71 w ere
also, w e suggest, far m ore likely to w orry about the consequences o f sim ply
abolishing a portion o f the crow n’s revenues, nam ely the king’s ow n
seigneurial dues,72 at a tim e o f crisis. To the extent that urban elites w ere
among the burdened rather than am ong the beneficiaries o f the seigneurial
system , m oreover, they would seem m ore likely to have been able to afford
to indem nify their own lords. Studies o f the actual operation o f the law,
indeed, show a greater urban proclivity to buy o ff the seigneurial rights than
was true o f the countryside.73
70. In the event, the rates of indemnification that came to be discussed did vary. The dramatic
caD of the due d'AigiriUon for an end to feudalism on the night of August 4 proposed a rate of
indemnification most profitable to the seigneurs and notably higher than that eventually enacted;
seeAP 8:344.
71. As may be seen, say, by examining their cahiers on the subject of government finances.
72. For those advocating a state takeover of church landholdings to alleviate the empty fisc, the
seigneurial rights of ecclesiastical institutions would also be taken into account. As the legislative
reconstruction of France proceeded, concern among the deputies for the continued collection of
seigneurial rights on the former royal or church property was evident When the departmental and
district administrations, to whom the supervision of "national property” was originally entrusted,
proved understandably lax in the collection of seigneurial rights, the National Assembly assigned
this responsibility elsewhere. See J. N. Luc, "Le rachat des droits féodaux dans le département de
la Charente-Inférieure (1789-1793),” in Albert Soboul, e<L, Contributions à thistoinpaysanne de la
Révolutionfrançaise (Paris: Editions Sociales, 1977), 314-15.
73. The peasants rarely paid the indemnities. In some places very few took advantage of the
indemnificatory aspects of the new laws; inothers, some people did, but these were largely anything
but peasants. In Charente-Inférieure, merchants, legal professionals, administrators, and urban
seigneurs were the main users of the elaborate indemnification procedures. Similarly in the
département of the Gironde, the indemnifications virtually all took place in Bordeaux andits suburbs.
In the département of the Nord, most indemnifications were made by bourgeois proprietors or even
nobles (including the duke of Orléans). In other départements studied in Brittany, Normandy,
Franche-Comté, Champagne, and Limousin, indemnification seems hardly to have taken place at alL
The département of Corrèze appears unusual in the extent of peasant utilization of the legal route
(at least in the hiDcountry—lowland Corrèze refused participation). See J. N. Luc, "Le rachat des
droits féodaux,” 332-33, 345; and Paysans et droits féodaux en Charente-Inférieure pendant la
Révolution française (Paris: Commission dHistoire de la Révolution Française, 1984), 125-59;
André Ferradou, Le rachat des droits féodaux dans la Gironde, 1790-1793 (Paris: Sirey, 1928),
210-12; Robert Garraud, Le rachat des droits féodaux et des dîmes inféodées en Haute-Vienne
(Limoges: Imprimerie Dupuy-Mouknier, 1939); Jean MiDot, L'abolition des droits seigneuriaux dans
le département du Doubs et la région comtoise (Besançon: Imprimerie Millot Frères, 1941), 172-96;
Georges Lefebvre, Les paysans du Nord pendant la Révolution française (Paris: Armand Colin,
1972), 387-90; Philippe Gotqard, "L'abolition de la féodalité dans le district de Neuchâtel (Seine-
Inférieure),” in Albert Soboul, ed., Contributions à l'histoire paysanne de la Révolution française
(Paris: Editions Sociales, 1977), 366-73; Donald Sutherland, The Chouans: The Social Origins of
Popular Counter-Revolution in Upper Brittany, 1770-1796 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982), 139-
41; Jean-Jacques Clère, Les paysans de la Haute-Marne et la Révolutionfrançaise: Recherches sur les
It is striking that the actual legislation o f the early revolutionary period

responds in a broad w ay to the pattern o f dem ands. The political and
intellectual histories o f the legislation are taken up in Chapters 8 and 9 , but
it is useful at this point to jump ahead tem porarily to show the broad
correspondence o f the eventual legislation and the cahiers. In a threatening
atm osphere o f peasant revolt, the National Assem bly, on the night o f August
4, 1789, was the scen e o f a com bination o f ideological fervor, careful
calculation, and resignation to the inevitable in which one deputy after
another called for an end to all sorts o f privilege. The com m ittee charged
with drafting the detailed legislation to bring about the heralded end to
feudalism skillfully managed the minimum conceivable, when they finally
reported half a year later. The law yers had drawn a distinction betw een
seigneurial rights that w ere the results o f an initial act o f violent appropria
tion and those that derived from a consensual con tract The form er, held
illegitim ate, w ere to be abolished outright The latter w ere legitim ate
property, but no longer desirable under m odem conditions, and w ere
therefore to be elim inated upon paym ent o f an indem nity (and still en force
able pending such paym ent). The distinction was historically precarious
since no one really knew the m ix o f coercion and consent in the origins o f
m ost rights in what the French call the night o f tim e; and it proved politically
im possible since the peasants couldn’t and wouldn’t m eet the detailed term s
for indem nification.
What is im pressive in the present context is that the intricate legalism s o f
the Com m ittee on Feudal Rights distinguished am ong the various rights
along the lines o f the cahiers. Outright abolition was the declared fate o f
rights that rested on distinctions o f status honor.*74 Such rights included
the right to bear arm s and the various recreational privileges for which
indem nification found no support w hatsoever in the cahiers. A s for seigneur
ial ju stice, uncom pensated abolition was also the order o f the day; a decision
on a variety o f rights held to be part and parcel o f the right o f ju stice was
deferred.75 (E ven in seven m onths, the com m ittee couldn’t deal with
everything.) The periodic rental dues, on the other hand, w ere slated for
indem nification,76 the m ajority position on m ost o f them for the Third E state.
The categories interm ediate in Third Estate support for indem nification
structure foncières it la communauté villageoise (1780-1825) (Paris: Editions de l'Histoire de b

Révolution française, 1988), 189-91; Jean Boutier, Campagnes en émoi: Révoltes et Révolution en
bas-Limousm, 1789-1800 (TVeignac: Editions "Les Monédières,” 1987), 146-51.
74. See AP 12:172-77. On honorific distinctions, see Title I, Art. 1.
75. Title Q, Art 39.2 andAP 11:499. The relevant detailed legislation ending seigneurial courts
was part of the general restructuring of the judicial system and therefore folowed a different path
thanmost seigneurial rights.
76. If it could be proven that a particular payment derived from coercion rather thancontract, it
would be abolished. Ibid., Title QL Arts. 1-2.
tended to receive a m ore com plex and interm ediate legislative determ ina
tion. T he seigneurial m onopolies,77 dues on fairs and m arkets,7* seigneurial
tolls,79 and com pulsory labor services80 w ere to be abolished unless evidence
o f a contract could be produced, in which case they w ere to be maintained
pending indem nification. Since such evidence could rarely be produced, this
was not, in practice, far from abolition, but it was a pow erful statem ent that
the rights w ere not to be taken as necessarily and intrinsically illegitim ate.
W hile serfdom and associated practices, such as mainmorte, w ere to be
abolished outright, dues paid by serfs that in the opinion o f the subtle jurists,
could have been assessed on free m en or free land (and hence w ere not
inherently servile), could continue to be assessed, subject to the free
peasant’s indem nity opportunities.81 The mutation rights do not fit this neat
picture o f conform ity to the cahiers quite so easily. Retrait féodale was
indeed declared abolished, consistent with the view s shown in Tables 3 .4
and 3 .6 . But lods et ventes as w ell as other dues on property transfers w ere
slated for indem nification although this was not a very strongly supported
proposal in the spring o f 1789.82
W ith the exception o f such dues on property transfers the only rights
made unconditionally subject to indem nification w ere those for which Third
Estate support for that option was greater than for pure abolition. But notice
the degree o f peasant acquiescence in this program . If the Third E state
cahiers w ere consistently m ore w elcom ing to indem nification than the coun
tryside, they w ere nonetheless broadly similar in which specific aspects o f
seigneurialism w ere appropriate for com pensation. A s far as periodic rentals
w ere concerned there actually was m ore support in the parish cahiers for
indem nification than for abolishing them outright (although the sam e cannot
be said o f dues on property transfers). In short, insofar as the cahiers
represented peasant opinion or w ere at least believed to do so, the new
politicians o f the revolution had som e grounds to think that the agrarian
reform they favored as detailed m M arch 1790 would be acceptable to
peasant France. Although the extrem ely im portant lim itations to the aboli
tion adopted by the National Assem bly with respect to m onopolies, tolls,
labor services, and serfdom have no basis in the parish cahiers, those
77. Ibid., Title U, Arts. 23-26. In a display of concern for property, attacks on the ndb, ovens,
andwinepresses were outlawed.
78. Ibid., Title n, Arts 17-21. The former seigneurs are alowed to keep the structures ediere
the market takes place andto sel or rent them.
79. Ibid., TitieH Arts 13-15.
80. Title n. Art 27.
81. Title n. Arts. 1-6. In a preliminary report to the National Assembly, the spokesman for the
Committee on Feudal Rights reasoned: “Ybu have considered mainmorte illicit and have happily the
courage to ban it; but when, in whatever way, an Ofidt condition is joined to a proper one, does
nuKfymg the first affect the second? Youall knowit does not” (4P 11:502).
82. Title m. Art 2.
lim itations w ere in the sym bolic realm in which the parish cahiers generally
took little in terest Few lords could actually prove a contractual basis for the
labor services, for exam ple, as the law dem anded. The parish cahiers,
m oreover, had supported com pensation for periodic paym ents and the
A ssem bly had conceded outright abolition o f the recreational privileges, the
sym bolic apparatus and, m ost critically, the courts. The peasants o f the
spring o f 1789 w ere not pressing for much m ore than they w ere given in
the spring o f 1790. (L et us note the im portant corollary that they got little
that they did not press for— a central them e to be dealt with at length
below .) Certainly they had pressed for far less than the com plete abolition o f
the seigneurial regim e that August 4 appeared to prom ise. The Constituent
A ssem bly had good reason to believe, m istakenly, that they could get away
with defaulting on that prom ise. But the peasants o f M arch 1790 w ere not
those o f M arch 1789. The indem nification plan foundered cm m assive peasant
resistance and, indeed, triggered renew ed and increasingly w idespread rural
insurrection.83
What Can be Reformed—and How?

T here are assem blies that opted neither for maintaining the status quo nor
the term ination (with or without com pensation) o f such burdens. The
burden, or at least one o f its aspects, is to be relieved, rather than
term inated or maintained in tact In considering the specific area o f rural
burdens, I include under “ reform ” demands that taxes, ecclesiastical pay
m ents, or seigneurial claim s be reduced (but not that they be ended);
demands that injustices in assessm ent or collection be elim inated; as w ell as
demands for the provision o f som e legal rem edy for nefarious abuses, the
establishm ent o f som e supervisory authority, sim plification or standardiza
tion o f collection, elim ination o f arbitrariness in assessm ent or collection ,
rem oval o f inequalities in the distribution o f the burden and the institution o f
various form s o f efficiency. We observed, toward the beginning o f this
chapter, that all three collection s o f docum ents contained substantial num
bers o f reform ist grievances with regard to taxation, considerably few er
with regard to ecclesiastical paym ents, and few er still concerning the
seigneurial regim e. Taxation was actually m ore likely to attract reform
proposals than institutions other than burdens. The seigneurial rights w ere
to be elim inated or, for a portion o f the nobility, retained; it appeared
difficult for many to imagine their im provem ent Taxes, on the other hand,
w ere to be im proved. The pattern o f demands to replace an institution by
83. For the dialogue of peasant insurrection and revolutionary legislation, see Chapter 8.
another was sim ilar it was proposed with any notable frequency only for
taxation. Hardly anyone wanted a seigneurial right replaced.
The data suggest a certain level o f acceptance o f the central state, but it
can by no m eans be maintained that the French w ere happy with their taxes.
On the contrary, w e have seen that taxes w ere the m ost com m on subject
o f grievance in the cahiers o f all three groups (see Chapter 2, p. 36). What
is equally d ear is that all groups— including the peasant com m unities— did
not propose to sim ply throw out taxes but to im prove the tax system . No
claim is made here that the state was regarded with enthusiasm , but it was
at least regarded as an unavoidable reality. This is m ost definitely not the
case for seigneurial dom inatioa T h ose w ho did not want to keep the claim s
o f the lords as they w ere (quite a rare outlook outside the nobility) tended
toward abolition (although many, particularly am ong the urban notables,
favored a protracted and indem nified p rocess). Even am ong those for whom
indem nification may have been em braced as a sm okescreen, is it not
significant that such a device was needed? From the village to the château
the French held that the seigneurial rights could not, on the w hole, be
im proved— but they certainly could be jettison ed altogether.
The state’s claim s on resou rces w ere quite another m atter. Virtually no
one wanted to keep these claim s operating as at present; but reform and
replacem ent outw eighed outright elim ination by a w ide margin. The m odem
French state may have been an achievem ent o f the Revolution, but the
French people— not just the national elites but the inhabitants o f the
villages— appeared ready for its existence. This readiness may have been a
grudging one, but it w as already in place. Charles Tilly84 has argued for a
long-term shift in the nature o f collective political action in W estern Europe.
The grow th o f the state and the intrusion o f the m arket are at first, he
contends, bitterly resisted by com m unities struggling to defend their sense
o f their traditional rights. A s the state and m arket eventually stood unde
feated and indeed em erged strengthened through the defeat o f their ene
m ies, there was a shift to demands for pow er within these structures.
T hese new er demands might w ell take the form o f laying claim to new rights
never before enjoyed. The French Revolution, in our data, appears as a
point at which the total opposition to the state as such had passed: what
was now at issue was a better state.85
84. For one among many essays: “Collective Violence in European Perspective,” in Hugh Davis
Grahamand Ifcd Robert Gurr, eds., TheHistory of Violence mAmerica (New York: Bantam Books,
1969), 4-44.
85. Tb be sure it would be foolish to identify one moment in a complex, long-term, ambiguous,
contested, and hard-to-measure process as the instant of transformation. Tilly, for example, points
to the continuity of collective action across the Revolution; in his view the mid-nineteenth century
is more of a turning point than the great eighteenth-century upheaval; see The Contentious French
(Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1986), 380-404. Recently, the portrait of
Taxation: Services and Equity

Since the m ost interesting, and perhaps surprising, contrast o f the taxation
proposals with those concerning seigneurial rights is the substantial support
for reform that had found a hom e not just am ong elites but in rural
com m unities, w e shall exam ine those view s o f village France m ore closely.
If w e can understand what m akes taxes w orth reform ing in the view o f
parish assem blies, w e may get som e d u es as to what m akes the seigneurial
regim e beyond reform . It is evident that there are tw o quite distinct groups
o f taxes. Demands for reform or replacem ent strongly outw eigh dem ands
for abolition for the taille, vingtièmes, capitation, the registration taxes, and
the corvée royale. Demands for abolition, on the other hand, dom inate with
regard to the aides, tow n duties, gabelle, taxes on manufactured good s, and
franc-fief. The custom s duties occupy an ambiguous position depending on
what one counts as “ reform .” Som e o f these taxes w ere defined earlier (see
Chapter 2, p. 36 et se q .). The other principal taxes include the traites, an
extensive netw ork o f tolls and custom duties; various assessm ents on
m erchandise entering or exiting tow ns (grouping together dem ands referring
to octrois and droits dentrée et de sortie)', various fees collected on the
registration o f legal docum ents (including grievances addressing the droit de
contrôle, droit d’insinuation, droit de centième denier, and droits domaniaux);
and a variety o f fees accom panying governm ent inspection o f m anufactured
goods (often referred to as droits de marque), particularly on iron, leather,
soap, and oils (see Table 3 .7 ).
N otice that the differences shown in Table 3 .7 are quite substantial. F or
each tax or group o f taxes, rural com m unities favored abolition or favored
reform by a w ide margin. What distinguishes the tw o groups o f taxes from
(Hie another? T h ose slated for abolition are all am ong the Old Regim e’s
indirect taxes. The reform able taxes include the three m ajor direct taxes
(taille, capitation, vingtièmes), the registration taxes, and the com pulsory
labor on the royal roads that was now on the way to replacem ent by a
m oney tax.86 The traites may also be held to be reform able, depending on
a traditional rural community besieged by «täte and market has been caled into question. See Root,
frasants and King m Burgundy. For some of the proposals for reorganizing the state, see
John Markoff, “Governmental Bureaucratization: General Processes and an Anomoious Case,"
Comparative Studies in Society andHistory 17 (1975): 479-503.
86. Various reforms had already been instituted mseveral provinces prior to the decrees of the
late 1780s that were to replace it altogether by a money tax over the next several years. The
uneven application of these decrees (Brittany, for example, maintained the corvée unaltered), their
recency, the strength of local resistance to the new money tax, and perhaps a general distrust of
the steadiness of official policy are reflected in those many cahiers that treat forced labor as very
much a live issue. See Joseph Letaconnoux, Le régime de la corvée en Bretagne au XVIIIe siècle
(Rennes: Pbhoo et Hommay, 1905), 100-106; Robert Werner, frmts et Chausées ¿Alsace au dix-
huitièmesiècle (Strasbourg: Imprimerie Heitz, 1929), 58-86,100-114; Marcel Marion, Dictionnaire
T àble 3 .7 . Parish Cahiers Demanding Abolition or Reform o f Specific Taxes (% )
Reform or
Type o f Tax Abolish Replace CAO
D irect taxes
Taille 13% 75% (293)
Vingtièmes 24 56 (165)
Capitation 20 57 (122)
Indirect taxes
Aides 66 29 (260)
Town duties (droits dentrée, droits
desortie, octrois) 57 10 (87)
Gabelte 67 34 (325)
Taxes on manufactures 72 22 (166)
Franc-fief 90 11 (95)
Registration taxes (droits
domaniaux, droit de contrôle,
droit d’insinuation, droit de
centième denier) 27 63 (247)
Customs duties (traites)
1. Demands to abolish internal
custom s duties regarded as
reform 25 63 (262)
2. Demands to abolish internal
custom s duties regarded as
“abolish” 78 19 (262)
Compulsory labor
Corvée royale 21 54 (364)
which aspect is under consideration, a point to which I shall return. If

anything dearly distinguishes the tw o groups it is not the sheer size o f the
paym ents. The taille was often heavy but reform able; the aides and gabelle,
often heavy as w ell, w ere n o t N or is there a d ear relation to how frequently
a tax is the subject o f grievance. The gabelle is one o f the m ost discussed
taxes (see Table 2 .1 ) and is slated for abolition by a tw o-to-on e margin;
although the droit de contrôle is also a front-runner in the quantity o f
com plaints, the registration taxes generally are seen as objects o f reform .
L et us explore the m ore extrem e position generally taken on the indirect
taxes; w e shall return to the exceptional cases o f the registration taxes and
the custom s duties below (see p. 107). Indirect taxes w ere, first o f all,
des institutions de la France au XVtte et XVIIIe sitcles (Paris: Picard, 1969), 153-55 and Impôts
directs, 113-19; Guy Arbelot and Bernard Lepetit, AÜas de la Révolutionfrançaise, voL 1, Routes
et communications (Paris: Editions de l'Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, 1987), 32;
Georges Weulersse, La pkysiocratie à Taube de la Révolution, 1781-1792 (Editions de l’Ecole des
Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, 1965), 109-12.
assessed cm econom ic activities o f one sort or another. The aides, say,

w ere assessed on the sale o f alcoholic beverages. Second, the indirect
taxes, for much o f their history, w ere not collected by governm ent agencies
but by the agents o f tax farm s, notably the Royal G eneral Farms, the
com plex collection apparatus for many m ajor taxes, which was leased on a
periodically renegotiated basis to a syndicate o f financiers.87
It was rather w idely recognized that the inefficacy o f the tax system
involved its adm inistrative structure and not m erely the capacity o f potential
taxpayers to protect their incom es through personal or regional privilege.
The adm inistrative critique, how ever, was usually aim ed at the indirect
taxes. The leasing o f the tax collection apparatus to the corporation o f Royal
G eneral Farm ers raised many questions: to what degree w as the state
getting the full benefits o f its collection and to what degree was a syndicate
o f the rich ripping o ff the treasury? To what degree w ere those w hose
m otivation was private profit resisting tax reform s that m ight ultim ately
increase the wealth o f the state by eliminating obstacles to econom ic
developm ent (by reducing or eliminating, for exam ple, the internal tolls
collected by the G eneral Farm s)? To what degree could the crow n even
penetrate the m aze o f financial contracts within which the tax system w as
enm eshed so that rational planning would be possible? W hen a leading
historian o f Old Regim e finances w rites o f indirect taxation, he cites M eeker’s
rem ark that hardly one or tw o people in each generation could make sense
o f the system .88 Such observations might equally w ell have been made o f
the w orld o f the direct taxes89 but the visibility o f the corporation o f G eneral
Farm ers and the open negotiation o f the term s on which they leased the tax
farm s made evident that the collection o f the indirect taxes was a speculative
business venture.
The appearance o f linkage with private profit rather than state enterprise
and public function would seem to be a m ajor pole attracting a m ore
intransigent form o f discontent h ere.90 Indeed, the central governm ent’s
occasional but harsh judicial assaults on its own financiers, a tradition
culminating in the revolutionary execution o f the tax-farm ers, may have
87. George T. Matthews, The Royal General Farms in Ei&teenth-Century France (New Tforic
Columbia University Press, 1958).
88. Marcel Marion, Histoirefinancière de la France depuis 1715 (Puis: Rousseau, 1914), 1:27.
89. John Bosher has demonstrated how Kttle effective bureaucratie control existed in the direct
tax system; but the vivid visibility of the General Farms was lacking. See Bosher, French
Finances, 1770-1795: From Business to Bureaucracy (Cambridge; Cambridge University Press,
1970), 67-110.
90. For a village near Rouen, those associated with the General Farms are “the state's leeches.
They are vermin who devour it; they are a plague that infects it. There are as many places where
they are loathed as there are places where they exist” See Marc Bouloiseau, ed., Cahiers de
doléances du tiers état du bailliage de Rouen pour les états généraux de 1789 (Rouen: Imprimerie
Administrative de la Seine-Maritime, 1960), 308.
contributed to the im age o f thievery that hung over the w hole tax system
but especially over the G eneral Farm s.91 W hile a sense at burden is central
to the rural w orld’s expression o f grievance in the spring o f 1789, the sheer
weight o f the burden is not the only issue: the burdens o f participating in
French life are to be made tolerable, but the burdens o f contributing to
either seigneurial revenues or the multimillionaires o f the Royal G eneral
Farms are to be elim inated.92 Paym ents for public purposes may be re
form ed; paym ents for private purposes are to be abolished. H ence taxes
are m ore reform able than seigneurial rights; and am ong taxes those associ
ated with private parties— the indirect taxes— are less reform able than
those not so tainted. (W e shall ask below w hether the reverse holds: are
those seigneurial or ecclesiastical paym ents that might be seen as supporting
a public purpose relatively prone to attract reform dem ands?)
The direct tax sector, m oreover, how ever odd, haphazard, or unfair in
appearance, at least had the potential o f being converted into (or being
replaced by) taxes keyed to ability to pay w hereas taxes on econom ic
transactions are alm ost inherently regressive. The attem pts to reform the
principles o f assessm ent o f the taille, or to supplem ent it with taxes initially
intended to be levied m ore universally and m ore equitably like the capitation
and the various vingtièmes,93 how ever distorted in ultimate actual practice,
testify to the recurrent hope that such taxes w ere capable o f revision. But
what sort o f reform ? To refashion a burden might mean a reduction in its
w eight, an assurance that it be directed toward a good use, that its costs be
fairly shared or that its collection be as efficient as possible. All these may
play a role, but the public attention to privilege in the late eighteenth century
suggests an examination o f proposals for reform through an alteration in
who bears the burden.
We can rather crudely m easure the w eight that considerations o f equity
had am ong reform proposals by examining demands that privileges or
exem ptions in the allocation o f burdens be elim inated; that the burden be
borne equally by all w ho hold land, or by all households, or by all w ho live in
France (or by som e other definition o f the body o f taxpayers); or that the
burden be proportional to means (w hether understood as the value o f land,
the potential for earnings, or som e unspecified sense o f capacity). W e wish
to know the degree to which the cahiers respond to equity considerations
when they are advocating reform . Table 3 .8 presents the percentage o f
91. James RBey makes a good case that perceptions of the profits of tax-farming far outstripped
the reality, substantial as that reality was; see The Seven Years Warand the OldRegime in France:
The Economic andFinancial TbU(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), 62-67.
92. It may be that the sense of private profit at the expense of the suddenly impoverished that
tainted the court-sponsored auctioneers underlies the extent of peasant attention to them (see
Table 2.1).
93. Marian, Impôts directs.
reform grievances that urge a m ore equitable sharing o f the burden. We see
quite clearly the very distinctive nature o f taxation. Equity considerations in
all three groups o f docum ents are strongly focused on taxation. B y contrast,
w hatever other reform m easures might be proposed with regard to the
seigneurial regim e, an equitable distribution o f the burden is pertinent for
but a m iniscule num ber o f noble and Third Estate assem blies and o f no
interest w hatsoever to the country people w ho pay.
The m ost general grievances about taxes are also quite revealing. Exam
ining all docum ents that speak o f taxation in general rather than— or in
addition to— discussing any specific tax, an im pressive 79% o f rural com m u
nities raise som e issue o f equity.94 The contrast with general discussion o f
the tithe or o f the seigneurial rights is sharp. A scant 4% o f cahiers that
discuss seigneurial rights as an aggregate speak o f a fairer o r better
distribution o f the burden. The figure for the tithe is close to identical That
the burden be borne by m ore and stronger shoulders is characteristic o f
proposals about tax reform and no other exaction. This suggests a closer
took, tax by tax, as it w ere. The data for the parish cahiers are displayed in
Table 3 .9 . A glance suffices to show how insignificant such concerns w ere
for m ost o f the indirect taxes and how w eighty a com ponent o f proposals to
change those burdens that w ere seen as directly im posed by the state. N ote
that the weight o f a particular tax or its peculiar noxiousness d oes not seem
to be the issue here. Forced labor struck many o f the enlightened as
barbaric95 w hereas the registration fees w ere m erely a (m ajor) nuisance;
yet equity occupies one-third o f the parish docum ents that do not call for
outright abolition o f the form er and very few o f those that take up the latter.
The special salience o f equity issues in discussions o f the direct taxes
‘D tble 3 .8 . Reform Grievances Showing Concerns for Equity (% )
Type o f Burden Parishes Third Estate Nobility
Taxation 52% 46% 51%

Ecclesiastical payments 8 7 4
Seigneurial rights 0 3 3
Note: This table refers to demands concerning privileges and exemptions (whether attached to
individuals, groups, or regions); demands advocating equalization of burdens or making them
proportional to wealth. These percentages are based on all reform grievances.
94. If we are at all persuaded by C. B. A. Behrens’s argument that the extent of taxation
privilege has been much exaggerated or by James Riley’s contention that the consequences of the
structure of privilege were far less irrational and socially inefficient than often assumed, the extent
to which the privilege issue infused thinking about taxation is aDthe more striking; see C. B. A.
Behrens, “Nobles, Privileges and Taxes in France at the End of the Anden Régime,” Economic
History Review, ser. 2, 15 (1963): 451-75; and Riley, Seven Years War, 44-45, 54-55, 68, 71.
95. Royal and seigneurial corvées alike are characterized by the Third Estate of Rustamg as
“humiliating remains of ancient servitude” (AP 2:368).
Ib b le 3 .9 . Tax Equity Concerns in Parish Cahiers'. Reform Grievances Demanding a

Redistribution o f Tax Burden (% )
Percentage o f
Thx Reform Grievances (AO*
D irect taxes
Taille 46% (216)
Vingtièmes 51 (92)
Capitation 70 (67)
Indirect taxes
Aides 26 (58)
Town duties (droits d entrée, droits de sortie, octrois) 37 (24)
Gabelle 8 (102)
Taxes on manufactures 3 (44)
Franc-fief 6 (20)
Registration taxes (droits domaniaux, droit de
contrôle, droit d’insinuation, droit de centième
denier) 3 (173)
Customs duties
1. (Demands to abolish internal custom s duties
regarded as "reform ”) 2 (161)
2. (Demands to abolish internal custom s duties
regarded as “abolish") 6 (57)
Compulsory labor
Corvée royale 32 (203)
This tabie refers to demands concerning privileges andexemptions (whether attached to individuals,
groups, or regions); demands advocating equalization of burdens or making them proportional to
wealth. Excluded: demands for abolition (with or without compensation); demands for maintenance.
This is the number of cahiers which demand tax reform (and thereby excludes those calling for
abolition or maintaininga tax unchanged).
may derive in part from their distinctive character and the debates brought
cm in the collection p rocess itself. O ne pictures, for exam ple, the controller-
general w earily negotiating with the intendants— the chief royal administra
tors in the provinces— the burdens o f next year’s taille to be borne by each
généralité (the region under their jurisdiction). The intendants protest the
unfairness o f their own burden and the lightness o f the others’; all are
conscious o f those tow ns and provinces that by treaty have achieved a
reduced or fixed assessm ent. The intendant in turn engages in a dialogue
with his subordinates over the regional allocation o f the burden within his
généralité. Then, at the parish level, finally, the share o f each household
rem ains to be determ ined; and all, concealing their wealth, decry the
injustice o f their own assessm ent and resent the privileged persons w ho
need not pay at all (unless w e are in the pays de taille réelle in which property
carried fixed portions o f the total tax and privilege went with property not
persons). O nce taxes w ere levied at last, there is still the possibility o f
endless litigation: one’s sense o f the injustice o f it all could be brought

before the judges, w ho are never very keen (Hi royal taxation. Long before
1789, in short, the language o f equity was constantly on the lips o f those
who staffed the apparatus that allocated and collected the taille.
A series o f frustrated reform efforts, in which the central governm ent's
ceaseless quest for revenue took the form o f schem es to tax the insuffi
ciently taxed, kept equity issues salient from top to bottom o f the direct tax
system . T here was to be the taille tarifée, which would m ore precisely
assess land revenues; there was the capitation, intended to be a tax with no
exem ptions; there was a string o f taxes— o f which only the vingtièmes
survived to the late eighteenth century— that w ere to be uniform taxes on
revenues. T h ese taxes either becam e so saddled with privileges on the
m odel o f the taille as to be assim ilated to it in practice like the capitation, or
abandoned altogether like the precursors o f the vingtièmes, or so w idely
resisted as to yield far less than their apparent value like the vingtièmes
them selves.96
Demands concerning the corvée had a higher stress on equity than m ost
indirect taxes. It was perhaps m ore evident to many peasant com m unities
that roads provide a service than that many other state activities did. A s
they put it in E sves-le M outier “Abolish the privileges o f the order o f the
nobility and o f the clergy in the paym ent o f the corvée. Subject them to it
just like m em bers o f the Third Estate since they share in the advantages
and convenience o f the roads.”97 W hile the service was unproblem atic,98 the
issue o f the distribution o f the burden does stand o u t Like the direct
taxes, m oreover, the corvée was the subject o f considerable recent public
discussion.99 The com m utation into a m oney tax that would pay the w ages
o f road laborers was pushed by the central governm ent and resisted by the
courts with great vigor at the end o f the Old Regim e. Am ong partisans o f a
reform ed corvée, m oreover, there w ere significant differences that empha
sized issues o f fairness. If forced labor w ere to be replaced by a m oney tax,
ought that tax to fall on those near the roads who previously w ere drafted
into road gangs? Ought it to fall m ore w idely (on all w ho paid the vingtièmes,
for exam ple)? Ought it to fall on those w ho used the roads?100 Perhaps the
96. Marion, Impôts directs.

97. T. Massereau, Recueil des cahiers de doUmces des bailliages de Tburs et de Loches et cahier
general du bailliage de Ckmon aux ilôts généreaux de 1789 (Orléans: Imprimerie Moderne,
1918), 555.
98. The conte was earmarked foc roads, after aB, whereas what was purchased with the aides
or gabelle was considerably less evident
99. For a local study of conflicting views on corvée reform, see Anne Zink, “Parlementaires et
entrepreneurs: A propos des événements à Bascoms (1776-1782),” inLa France ¿Ancien Régime:
Etudes réunies en DumneurdePierre Goubert (Toulouse: Privât, 1984), 2:715-24.
100. Cahiers coping with these issues include the Third Estates of Auxerre, Avesnes, and
Rustaing; see AP 2:125, 152, 368. The Third Estate of Etampes offers the unusual proposal to
unusually great attention to equity issues evoked by the corvée was due to
the degree to which rural com m unities in m ost o f France had recently
experienced (me or another m ajor alteration in that burden.
Finally, the tw o anom olous indirect taxes— the registration taxes and the
custom s duties— resem ble the other indirect taxes in the low salience o f
equity issues but are like the direct taxes in the im portance o f som e sort o f
reform . A s for the droit de contrôle and the like, I would suggest that rural
com m unities, w hose m em bers w ere continually involved in transactions,
disputes, and agreem ents, recognized the value o f som e form o f registration
and therefore regarded such taxes, although tainted by their historical tie to
the G eneral Farms, as reform able.101 But the reform issues here concern
issues quite different from the distribution o f the burden. The parish o f
Beauheu-en-Argonne enum erates som e: “ For the contrôle, w e ask a fixed
and invariable schedule o f rates that may not be extended at the whim, o f
clerks; that these agents do not continually harass p oor people who do not
know what taxes one demands o f them and w ho therefore are subject to
fines; that the contrôle is surely necessary to establish the date o f contracts;
that this tax be m oderate and that other taxes not be added on; that, from
tim e to tim e, let there be displayed an announcem ent o f the taxes to which
erne is subject, so that an accidental slip o f m em ory not be punished
as fraud.” 102
The frequency with which the parishes discuss these registration taxes
(see Chapter 2) and the reform ist flavor o f these dem ands (see Table 3 .7 )
is yet another sign o f a rural acceptance o f a rationalizing state engaged in
the record-keeping that perm its a w orld o f freely negotiated contracts to
operate. France was ready for the bureaucratic state and the contractual
society. Was it ready as well for the legally trained professionals w ho draw
up proper contracts and staff the state’s recording and regulating agencies?
T hese grievances an the registration taxes are probably them selves a
sign o f the long habituation o f peasant com m unities to legal practice and
practitioners. We shall see many other signs.
A s is the case for those seigneurial rights that attract reform dem ands,
the main reform issues for the contrôle and insinuation taxes are not issues
o f equity. The custom s duties, too, seem capable o f reform (and w ith equity
have peacetime soldiers buDd roads that would not only save money but get the soldiers “used to
work and fatigue” (AP 3:287).
101. An example: The vilagerx of Lassay in the bailliage of Romorantin recognize the value of a
public repository of public acts but want the tax reduced to the amount needed to provide for those
who perform the service; see Bernard Edeine, ed.. Les assembliespréliminaires et la rédaction des
cahiers de doléances dans le bailliage secondaire de Romorantin (Blois: Imprimerie Raymond SiBe,
1949), 46.
102. Gustave Laurent, ed., Cahiers dedoliancespourles ttats-gtntrcna de 1789, vol 1, Bailliage
de Châlons-sur-Marne (Epemay. Imprimerie Henri ViOers, 1906), 70-71.
issues also beside the point). M any reform proposals in this case are
frequently quite specific to this tax: it is proposed that internal custom s be
elim inated so that duties would w ily be collected at the frontiers o f France.
This view point is reflected in the first row for traites in Table 3 .7 . In light o f
our discussion o f other taxes, it seem s a reasonable supposition that many
held custom s duties to have a useful function and m erely w ished the
eradication o f internal nuisances. If w ie w ished to include dem ands for
elim inating the internal duties under “abolish," w ie would have the second
row , which looks like the basic pattern for the other indirect taxes. In short
the internal traites are valueless, but the external trade barriers are to be
k ep t If rural com m unities distinguish custom s duties within the kingdwn
from those at its frw itiers, are they perhaps im plicitly distinguishing a
national French cwnm unity for whom justice is sought? M ovem ent o f goods
within France is no longer to be the occasion for enriching the General
Farm ers; but paym ents by foreign cw nm erdal interests to the General
Fanners are em inently acceptable. We will see shortly further evidence that
their taxation grievances reveal a sense o f a France beyond the local
com munity (see p. 137).
One sees here, I think, an em erging concept o f citizenship at w ork;
individuals, equal in their m oral w orth, are all to be assessed in accord with
sw ne principle o f equity103 and directly by the state. W hen it is a paym ent
to a lord, to the church or, w e now see, to the m anifestly private structure
o f interm ediaries that operated the indirect tax system , dtizenly equality is
irrelevant and such reform issues as might arise (and few er arise to
begin with) are concerned with rather different issu es.104 The thirty-five
households o f Heming (near Sarrebourg) w ere represented by a cahier in
which these distinctions are d ear. The main taxation concern is that the
d ergy pay their fair share on the m odel o f Jesus w ho, like all the rest, paid
Caesar. “A ren't ecclesiastics subjects like u s?" the villagers ask. And they
go on: “ L et them join our ranks follow ing the exam ple o f our divine M aster
and pay the king" like their “ co-d tizen s." W hen this sam e docum ent arrives
at seigneurial rights, the main issue is the failure o f the current lord to live
up to his part o f the engagem ent entered into by lord and com m unity in
103. The cahiers are not uniformon the specific principle. Indeed they do not always even invoke
one. The primary issue is that aDare morally bound to participate; the precise quantitative formula
to assure this participation is simply less significant thanthe eradication of distinctions of quality. On
ideas about tax equity see Jean-Pierre Gross, "Progressive Taxation and Social Justice in Eigh
teenth-Century France,"Rest andPresent, no. 140(1993): 79-126.
104. Bryant Ragan’s research on peasant petitions in the early revolutionary years in the
département of the Somme shows a continuing pattern of demandingequity in direct tax assessment
but abolition of indirect taxes. See Bryant T. RaganJr., "Rural Political Activism and Fiscal Equality
in the Revolutionary Somme,” in Bryant T. RaganJr., and Elizabeth A Williams, eds., Recreating
Authority in Revolutionary France (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1992), 36-56.
1529. Since the lord has defaulted on his contractual obligations, the villagers
believe them selves released from their ow n obligations even though a court
ruled against them a dozen years earlier when they carried this belief into
refusal o f paym ent1
1061
5
0 7
0
Lord and Church: The Irrelevance of Equity

If a significant thrust o f taxation reform is the satisfaction o f a sense o f
equity through a proper, fairer, juster distribution o f the burden, what
considerations com e into play when village com m unities consider reform ing
other exactions? A glance at Table 3.10 is revealing. The casuels, it is clear,
are seen quite differently than the tithe. The tithe is seen as intim ately
linked to an absolutely essential social role. The pastoral activities o f the
priest m ust be paid for in som e way by som eone and such support must
provide, surely, for his m aterial w ell-being and the physical upkeep o f the
local church. I am suggesting then that it is the sense that this particular
paym ent purchases an indispensable service that energizes the reform ist
side o f rural France. Perhaps this may explain why the Third E state cahiers
are m ore prone to abolish than the countryside (reversing the pattern for
the seigneurial rights). The urban notables are less likely to value the
country priests than their parishioners. Many parish grievances are focu sed
on getting their paym ents out o f the hands o f the tithe-holders and into the
hands o f the priests; or on making sure the tithes are not spent on
maintaining the lifestyle o f a local lord but on maintaining the local church.108
A few parishes are even sym pathetic to indem nifying the current tithe-
holders as part o f a reform (see Table 3 .1 ). In these gaps betw een country
people and urban elites w e can see the bases for som e o f the Revolution's
m ost difficult dramas: the persistent peasant antiseigneurial action in a
countryside stim ulated by but not satisfied with legislated reform and the
rallying around the local priest in defense against urban and national pres
sures that gave so much energy to peasant counterrevolution.
And (Mice the tithe is suitably reform ed, why pay extra in the form o f the
casuels?im A s a village near Romorantin sees it: “ The tithes . . . falling by
105. P. Lesprand and L Bout, Cahiers de doléances des prévôtés bailliagires de Sarrebourg et
Phalsbourg et du bailliage de Uxheim pour les états généraux de 1789 (Metz: Imprimerie P. Even,
1938), 94-96.
106. The Third Estate cahiers sometimes concur. A succinct example is provided by the Third
Estate of Château-ThierTy: “The tithes, in their initial intention, hadthree purposes: first, providing
for the priests; second, the upkeep of the temples; and third, poor rebel The Third demands that
they be brought once again to these ends” (AP 2:674).
107. Analogously one finds demands for a single registration tax If one separates the droit de
contrôle, the insinuation, and the centième denier (unlike Tables 3.7 and3.9, which aggregate them),
one sees a preponderance of rural villages actually favor abolition of the last of these. Was this
specific registration tax singled out for abolition due to its having become tainted by the seigneurial
Ib b le 3 .1 0 . Parish Cahiers Demanding That Ecclesiastical Payments Be Abolished,

Reform ed, or Maintained (% )
Abolish Reform Maintain (N)
Casuels 80% 6% 2% (95)

Tithe 29 39 0 (102)
their nature principally (Hi the class o f cultivators, it would b e m ore

advantageous to free them by indem nifying the proprietors and assigning
the curés and others responsible for souls a reasonable revenue drawn on
either public or ecclesiastical s o u r ce s .. . . Finally, and as a consequence o f
the above, the suppression o f the obligatory casuels that pastors demand for
m arriages and burial services— the last o f the taxes still to be paid after
life— which so often afflict the m ost indigent and num erous class o f soci
e ty .” *108 In both the case o f ecclesiastical burdens and the case o f seigneurial
rights the central issue for reform ers is obtaining an appropriate service
com m ensurate with what is exacted. L et the tithe be appropriately used; let
the lords do their job (when there is on e). The equity issues, so im portant
when the service can be assum ed (as in som e taxes) does not arise.
Against the background o f reform ism in taxation and ecclesiastical exac
tion, w e now return seigneurial rights to center stage. I present the detailed
evidence on reform proposals for seigneurial rights in Table 3.11. Peasant
reform ism always involves a m inority o f com m unities— never many m ore
than one-third—and varies greatly from one right to the n ex t The differ
ences in support for reform o f the seigneurial rights also suggest that those
rights that are seen as linked to essential functions (som eone has to hunt,
dispense ju stice, supervise m arkets) are m ore likely to receive reform
proposals than are those that do not serve the village com m unity (no one
has to build and stock a fishpond). N ot many parishes are concerned with
dues on fairs and m arkets, but to those w ho take up these rights, are not
fairs and m arkets vital institutions that m ust be initiated and operated by
som eone? If so, why not the seigneur— but in an im proved fashion? W hy is
milling the m ost reform able seigneurial m onopoly? It may be a recognition
o f the public function perform ed. Consider a com parison with the m onopoly
on bake-ovens: even a com munity prosperous enough for several peasants
to afford their ow n small ovens109 would still be a m ost im probable base for
property with which it was associated? In distinguishing the tithe from the casuels and the droit de
centième denier from other similar fees, the country people show a judicious quality not always
evident in accounts of rural chaos; and they show a sense of an interconnected social system not
always evident in accounts of angry and ignorant villagers.
108. Edeine, Cahiers de Rùmorantm, 47. Notice that this parish proposes to deal with the
titheholders by indemnifying them.
109. Renauldon’s article on the monopoly on bake-ovens expresses a concern over such small
m ore than one milL Even w ell-off peasants might easily think o f a mill as
inherently m ore communal than an oven .*110 W hy are som e periodic pay
m ents seen by m inorities as reform able? Perhaps w e see here the influential
role o f fairly substantial peasants in rural France: they w ere villagers who
could look forw ard to collecting rents them selves and are keen to protect
property rights. They hope to rem ove the ills o f rentlike exactions but not
to abolish them .111
On Seigneurial Courts (and Other Objects

of Rural Reform)
We may g o beyond the statistical patterns by attending to what France's
villagers say when they propose reform s. L et us consider first and forem ost
the seigneurial courts, which vie with rights over fairs and m arkets for the
distinction o f attracting the highest proportion o f peasant reform proposals,
but stand utterly alone when one takes into account how frequently seigneur
ial courts are discussed in the first place (see Table 2 .5 ). The seigneurial
courts are, I suggest, reform able to the degree that there was a living
function to be carried out in som e fashion. Table 3.11 show s that the
enthusiasm o f the peasants for reform ing the lord's courts exceed s that o f
the Third Estate by alm ost as much as the Third E state’s desire to
am eliorate the hunting rights exceeded that o f the peasants. T he Third
E state, m ore confident in the royal courts, are less likely to see much virtue
in doing anything other than simply abolishing the seigneurial com ponent o f
the judicial system ; ju st as the parish cahiers are m ore com fortable than the
urban notables in sim ply abolishing the restrictions on hunting, with all that
im plied for an arm ed rural population.
If rural France in som e m easure accepted the continued existen ce o f
individual ovens that appears to acknowledge an empirical reality. See RenauUon, Dictionnatn des
fiefs, 1:477.
110. CL Gindin, "Aperçu sur les conditions de la mouture des grains en France, fin du XVIIIe
siècle, * in Albert SobouL ed., Contributions à Hústoin paysanne de la Révolutionfrançaise (Paris:
Editions Sociales, 1977), 159-88.
111. The efforts to redaim what was seen as common land encroached upon by the lords
included pressures by some to divide the commons and by others to preserve them. Attempts to
purchase the lands of church, king, and émigrés were frequent enough, but movements for a
general redistribution of land, the seizure of large properties, or the occupation of land other than
the commons were most uncharacteristic of the entire revolutionary period. The extensive support
for either indemnifying or reforming periodic payments seems to foreshadow the respect for
property that is in comparative perspective one of the striking features of France’s rural revolution.
On the role of peasant actions over land within the rural insurrections as a whole, see Chapter 5,
p. 250, and Chapter 8, p. 482.
Ih b le 3 .1 1 . Parish and Third Estate Documents Demanding That Seigneurial Rights

Be Reformed (% )
Right* Parishes Third Estate
Periodic dues
Cens 3% (17) 32% (28)
Champart 24 (92) 26 (61)
Cens et rentes 29 (86) 35 (37)
Periodic dues in general 34 (86) 23 (30)
Miscellaneous periodic dues 21 (38) 36 (22)
Seigneurial monopolies
Monopoly on ovens 1 (39) 8 (50)
Monopoly on milling 19 (128) 13 (70)
Monopoly on wine press 11 (37) 5 (44)
Monopolies in general 2 (90) 15 (103)
Assessments on economic activity
Seigneurial tolls 20 (61) 9 (117)
Dues on fairs and markets 36 (17) 16 (45)
Property transfer rights
Dues on property transfers (lods et ventes) 15 (60) 39 (49)
Retrait 2 (36) 25 (48)
Justice
Seigneurial courts in general 36 (104) 19 (90)
Seigneurial courts, miscellaneous 17 (41) 18 (56)
Hunting rights 15 (97) 39 (107)
Right to raise pigeons 13 (152) 18 (96)
Right to raise rabbits 8 (35) 13 (39)
Fishing rights 2 (17) 21 (24)
Symbolic deference patterns
Right to bear arms 7 (27) 5 (41)
Serfdom
Mainmorte 23 (9) 17 (36)
Serfdom in general 2 (18) 4 (26)
Other
Compulsory labor services 11 (102) 14 (109)
Miscellaneous right 16 (54) 9 (79)
Regime in general 18 (112) 18 (91)
‘Rights discussed in at least 20 Parishor 20 Third Estate cahiers (and at least 5 of each).
judicial activity, suitably reform ed, the w ays in which the seigneurial cou rts
might be altered to carry out their legitim ate tasks are spelled out d early in
tw o cahiers from the bailliage o f T toyes that, betw een them , enum erate
m ost o f the principal reform s being urged. The parish o f Buisson m akes it
d ear that its preference is for abolition. If that prove im possible, how ever,
im provem ents are easy to see. To begin with, the judges should be nam ed
by the king “ and totally independent o f the lord s.” “ F or,” this text continues,
“w ho is the official with a sense o f self-preservation w ho will find against the
lord—unless he be animated by bitter resentm ent— and w ho is the attorney
who will act with vigor and without fear?” The notaries, too, m ust be
independent A s things stand, legal records have a way o f getting lost or o f
being seized by the lord. Finally, the court officers are not only dependent
but are poorly trained. W hy, the assem bly o f Buisson asks, would a
com petent person make a career in a small seigneurial court?112
Buisson’s dem ands are com plem ented by those o f B ucey-en-O the. The
form er parish wanted to ensure judicial independence by preventing the lord
from appointing officials; the latter insists that, once appointed, those
officials be irrem ovable (unless properly convicted o f em bezzlem ent). A s an
added precaution the lord is not to be perm itted to bring cases regarding
him self or his lands before his ow n judge. The form er addressed itself to
the training o f court officials; the latter demands that the court have a full
com plem ent o f legal personnel so that all roles in the judicial p rocess can be
properly carried o u t In the sam e vein they insist on adequate physical
facilities: a proper courtroom and a proper jaiL Until such m easures are in
place, a higher court is to be u sed .113
O ther parish cahiers propose other m echanism s for ensuring judicial
independence or direct their attention to clarifying the sphere o f com petence
o f the seigneurial cou rts.114 What is com m on to all these reform proposals
is that they do not challenge the legitim acy o f som e sort o f judicial activity.
T hey are, som etim es only grudgingly, willing to let som ething called a
seigneurial court rem ain in existence, so long as it judges with im partiality,
skill, and efficiency. If these aims can be achieved, the seigneur may keep
the honorary aspect o f having justice done in his name. We have seen that
the parishes are not particularly concerned about the patterns o f sym bolic
deferen ce. Under their reform proposals the honorific sym bolism o f sei
gneurial justice will rest in force, but the m aterial benefits to the seigneur
and burdens to the rural community will be elim inated. It is alm ost as if
these proposals take the noble cahiers at their w ord when they insist that
they will renounce their material advantages but wish to continue their
honorific distinctiveness. “ If you are willing to bear the costs o f com m unity
serv ice,” one alm ost hears many a parish telling its lord, “ w e are willing to
honor you .” (D oes one also hear a w hisper am ong the villagers: “ T hey claim
to want honor, not incom e: very w ell, now w e have them ” ?)
112. Jules-Joseph Vernier, Cahiers de doltances du bailliage de Hoyes (principal et secondaires) et

da bailliage deBar-sur-Seinepour les étatsgénéraux de 1789 (lYoyes: P. Noue), 1909), 480-81.
113. Ibid., 466-67.
114. In the bailliage of Toulouse, for example, see the cahiers of Saint-Jory and Bruguières: Félix
Pasquier and François Galabert, Cahiersparoissiaux des sénichausfes de Tbulouse et de Comminges
en 1789 (Toulouse: E. Privat, 1925-28), 26, 61.
But why w ere the peasants m ore likely to grant that the seigneurial
courts had som e legitim ate function than they w ere for m ost o f the rest o f
the seigneurial regim e? Several recent studies suggest an answ er. Donald
Sutherland's w ork on upper Brittany115 takes the earlier w ork o f André
Giffard116 to task for too readily accepting the charge that the seigneurial
courts did nothing but en force the lords’ claim s. In fact, Sutherland show s,
the m ajority o f cases that cam e before them had nothing w hatsoever to do
with the seigneur’s interests. All sorts o f property disputes am ong their
dependents, a w ide variety o f family affairs, declarations o f pregnancy, the
verification o f w eights and m easures, the regulation o f the grain trade, and
the control o f popular festivals form ed the bulk o f their activities. O ne B reton
court had a considerable role in supervising uncontentious transactions,
regulating local m edical practice and diffusing judicial rulings m i abandoned
infants; the sam e court also had a significant role as a bulwark o f seigneurial
p ow er.117 Olwen Hufton’s survey o f research on local justice concludes that
not only w ere seigneurial courts dying because lords found them unprofit
able, but that even when viable, France’s lords did not find it w orthw hile
pressing their ow n disputes in these courts: fines levied m i peasants w ere
trivial com pared to judicial salaries. W hen seigneurial advisers on feudal law
proclaim ed “ju stice is only honorific,” Hufton urges us to take them at their
w ord. H onor and duty w ere the only reasons, in her view , for a lord to
maintain a c o u r t118 Bataillon’s judgm ent is that hostility to the lord 's courts
sprang m ore from seigneurial neglect than greed .119 Jonathan D ew ald’s
research on the history o f seigneurial justice in a Norman barony show s a
clear pattern o f decay: the num ber o f court sessions declined from 48 per
year in the late sixteenth century to 15 in the 1780s; the num ber o f
questions considered per session feO from 40 to 9; the value o f the leases
negotiated by those w ho took on the court clerkship (a position in w hich
they w ere paid by litigants for court docum ents) declined by m ore than fou r-
fifths. In 1735 the marquis sold the building that had served as courtroom
and ja il120 O ther scholars, how ever, argue for the continuing role o f the
115. The Chouans, 182-84.

116. André Giflard, Lesjustices seigneurialesen BretagneauxXVIIe etXVIIIt siicUs (1661-1791)
(Brionne: Montfort, 1903).
117. Jean-François Noël, “Unejustice seigneuriale de haute Bretagne à h fin de FAncien Régime:
b châtellenie de b Motte-Gennes,” Annales deBretagne 83 (1976): 127-67.
118. Olwen Hufton, “Le paysan et b loi en France au XVIIIe siècle,” Annales: Economies,
Sociétés, Civilisations 38 (1983): 682.
119. Jacques-Henri Bataillon, Lesjustices seigneuriales du bailliage deBmtoise à lafin de l'Ancien
Régime (Paris: Sirey, 1942), 152; see abo Robert Forster, The House ofSaulx-Tbvanes. Versailles
andBurgundy, 1700-1800 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1971), 85-86.
120. Jonathan Dewald, Ibnt-SL-Pierre, 1398-1789: Lordship, Community and Capitalism m
Earty ModemFrance (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1987), 254-55.
lords' courts in pressing (or even expanding) the lords’ daim s,121 or for a
continuing vigor generally.122 A bel Poitrineau finds great variety within a
single province: in the low er Auvergne one seigneurial court handled tw o
cases a year and another took on ninety-tw o.123 And in Burgundy, the Dijon
Parlem ent in 1768 seem s to have revived seigneurial courts that, while
functioning as judicial bodies in lesser cases, provided a fram ew ork for
convening the rural com munity under seigneurial co n tro l124
Peasant com m unities have their transactions to be validated, their quar
rels to be adjudicated, their rule-breakers to be controlled. N ot one peasant
cahier in our sam ple proposes the abolition o f all judicial institutions; the
issue confronting France’s villagers was w hether to count (Hi the royal or cm
the seigneurial courts and how to make the one or the other (or both) w ork
better. For many villagers, the advantages o f a nearby m agistrate w ho knew
local needs was an attractive option and one w hose restructuring was easier
to imagine than the m ore distant (and perhaps m ore m ysterious) royal
courts. R estif de la Bretonne’s idealized portrait o f his father, a prosperous
peasant becom e seigneurial judge, makes the case for the superior benefits
o f local experience over “ the quill-driving strangers,” 125 as w ell as providing
a vivid portrait o f a far-from -m oribund institution.
Clearly the actual practice o f seigneurial ju stice varied enorm ously. In
Aunis it enforced the seigneurial regim e, around Vannes it did not, and in
the Sarthe it was being abandoned by the lord s.126 B astier concluded that
the judges w ere com petent and honest in the region erf Toulouse but
121. Serge Dontenwffl, Une Seigneurie sous FAnden Régime: V “Etoile" en Briomutis du
XVIe au XVIIIe siècle (1575-1778) (Roanne: Editions Diffusion Horvath, 1972), 76-77. Anthony
Ciubaugh's research on seigneuries near St Jean d’Angély shows, in some detail, a vigorous
enforcement of seigneurial daims in their courts. See also Jean-Pierre Gutton, La sociabilité
villageoise dans Fancienne France (Paris: Hachette, 1979), 172-84, and Villages du Lyonnais sous
la monarchie (XVIe-XVlIIe siècles) (Lyon: Presses Universitaires de Lyon, 1978), 90-97.
122. Nicole Castan, Justiceet répression en Languedocà Ftpoque des lumiires (Paris: Flammarion,
1980), 149-55.
123. Abel Poitrineau, La Vie rurale en Basse-Auvergne au XVIIIe siècle, 1726-1789 (Paris:
Presses Universitaires de France, 1965), 636.
124. O. Morel, "Les Assises ou Grands Jours dans les justices seigneuriales de Bresse à la fin
de rAncien Régime (1768-1789)," Annales de la Société Êmulation et de FAgriculture de FAin
(1934): 230-84, 311-44.
125. Nicolas-Ediné Restif de la Bretonne, My Father's Ufe (Gloucester: Sutton, 1966), 71-74,
103-8.
126. Forster, Merchants, Landlords, Magistrates, 88-89, 101; LeGoff, Mames and its Region,
279; Bois, fíaysans de FOuesL Des Structures économiques et sociales au* options politiques depuis
Ftpoque révolutionnaire dans la Sarthe (Le Mans: Imprimerie M. VBaire, 1960), 402-3. The
seigneurial court near La Róchele that Forster studied was dung to tenaciously by the local lord in
the face of revolution and in spite of its minimal revenues (Forster, Merchants, Landlords,
Magistrates, 218-19).
Poitrineau finds the case quite otherw ise in A uvergne.127 N icole Castan finds
in Languedoc a great diversity: som e lords couldn’t afford to support a court
while others held it their civic duty.128 Around Sarlat seigneurial courts w ere
actually increasing their initiation o f criminal prosecutions.129 Pierre Villard’s
detailed study o f La M arche show s that while a still active seigneurial justice
was significant in enforcing the seigneurial rights (especially m onopolies and
mutation fees), peasants made far m ore frequent use o f this institution for
civil litigation than did the lords, no doubt attracted by the relatively low
costs and ready access that Villard can docu m en t130
To w hatever degree a national summary would find the courts to be
moribund (or alive but m erely a prop for the lord’s pocketbook), Sutherland's
w ork is persuasive that there w ere (daces w here there was a life o f quite a
different kind in this institution.131 The courts o f the spectacularly wealthy
house o f Bourbon-Penthièvre— the duke’s fortune was evaluated at over
one hundred million livres in 1794— w ere vigorously active throughout the
eighteenth century.132 It is for this reason, w e suggest, that a substantial
group o f parishes did not join the m ajority o f their fellow s in insisting on
abolition, but saw som e sense to demanding im provem ent
The cahier o f D olving in the bailliage o f Lixheim beautifully epitom izes the
m ajority outlook in a detailed and bitter case for abolition when it observes
that “ under such justice the people can never be anything but a hopeless
victim o f the m ost disastrous rapacity and pillage.” The seigneurial courts
are a “ sad residue o f the feudal regim e” and utterly u seless.133 If the people
o f D olving, like those o f many other parishes, thought seigneurial justice
127. Bastier, Féodalité au siècle des lumières, 120-25; Abel Poitrineau, “Aspects de la crise des
justices seigneuriales dans l’Auvergne,” RevueHistorique deDroitFrançais et Etranger (1961): 552.
128. Nicole Castan, Justice et répression en Languedoc, 103-21.
129. Steven G. Reinhardt, Justice in the Sartadais, 1770-1790 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State
University Press, 1991), 239. Increased court activity near Sarlat followed royal edicts of 1771 and
1772 which provided powerful inducements: under its terms, if a seigneurial court initiated criminal
actions, the royal courts would take the case- and its expenses—over; if the royal court moved
first, however, the seigneurial court became responsible for the costs (62-63). It is likely that these
edicts were only spottily enforced; it is, therefore, an interesting question whether they gave a
boost to seigneurialjustice inother places.
130. Pierre Villard, Les justices seigneuriales dans la Marche (Paris: Librairie Générale de Droit
et deJurisprudence, 1969), 181-235.
131. The major attempt at a national survey suggests that seigneurial courts were vigorous in
parts of Normandy and the Seine valley, Flanders, parts of Burgundy, Alsace, Franche-Comté, and
coastal Languedoc but withering away in central France as well as Provence and parts of De-de-
France. But where they were alive, they were focused on communal issues rather than seigneurial
exploitation; see Hufton, “Paysan et loi,“ 681-83.
132. Jean Duma, “Place de l’élément féodal et seigneurial dans la fortune d’un 'grand’: L’exemple
des Bourbon-Penthièvre,’’ La Révolution française et le monde rural (Paris: Comité des Travaux
Historiques et Scientifiques, 1989), 58, 63-64.
133. Lesprand and Bout, Cahiers de SarrebourgetPhalsbourg, 187.
badly wounded but still dangerous, and only wanted to adm inister the coup
de grâce, there was yet a significant m inority for whom this was a live
institution that deserved a future (or for which som e tolerable future was at
least im aginable).
The rural reform proposals for seigneurial justice may have had an official
inspiration. M ost o f the parish reform ism w e have observed restated the
principles o f the ill-fated Lamoignon reform s o f 1788.134 A t a relatively calm
m om ent in the crisis that eventually forced the calling o f the E states-
General, the governm ent issued a sw eeping set o f changes in judicial
organization. A small part o f this com plex package dealt with seigneurial
justice. Had the country people been influenced by the recent elite contro
versy? If one’s starting point is an im age o f an unthinking rural m ass into
which ideas are from tim e to tim e injected by external forces, (me m ight see
here an instance o f peasants getting their ideas from the educated. If one is
persuaded that the cahiers are generally showing a village w orld o f fine
distinction and careful reasoning, how ever, one might then w onder w hether
many villagers in the spring o f 1789 m erely looked to the abandoned
Lamoignon reform s as a statem ent o f the maximum to be achieved for the
m om ent: here was a p roject with som e elite support (after all, it had royal
authority behind it), yet that w ent too far to withstand the intra-elite
counterattack. On this m odel, rather than sim ple-m inded rustics blindly
taking up som e cast-off notions from their betters, w e have politically
thoughtful villagers finding a balance o f daring and caution in aligning with a
proposal that just might fly under the m ore favorable circum stances pre
sented by the deepening crisis. And on this m odel, too, w e ought not to be
surprised that, when favorable opportunity beckoned, peasants pushed even
further. It also suggests that w e see the cahiers not as so many utterances
o f opinion in vacuo but as pieces o f an intricate dialogue. In the spring o f
1789 the peasant-elite dialogue was carried on in the cahiers; in the
years that follow ed insurrection and legislation w ere im portant vehicles for
com m unication (see Chapter 8).
If w e have correctly characterized the reform ism o f rural France in 1789,
is not its underlying em phasis the curtailm ent o f the lords’ opportunities for
incom e and pow er coupled with the preservation o f their public claim s to
esteem ? Indeed, by curtailing the material interests in seigneurial courts, in
fairs and m arkets, in tolls, and less com m only, in the seigneurial mill, are
134. On the seigneurial aspects of the Lamoignon edicts see Marod Marion, La Garde des
SceauxLamoignon et la rifarmejudiciaire de 1788 (Paris: Hachette, 1905) andJohn Q. C. MackreU,
“Criticism of Seigneurial Justice in Eighteenth-Century France,” in J. F. Bosher, e<L, French
GovernmentandSociety, 1500-1850 (London Athkme, 1973), 127-28. The political background and
the overall judicial changes are covered in Egret, Pri-Rtvolution, 246-306; and Dawson, Provincial
Magistrates andRevolutionaryMides in France, 1789-1795 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
1972), 135-49.
not the lords being offered a new opportunity for earning public admiration?
The lords are being asked in effect to shoulder the costs o f carrying on vital
public functions.
Did those parish assem blies making such proposals have any basis for
even dream ing that the seigneurs would actually accept such term s? Would
the lords not sim ply let their courts sink deeper into ignorance and incom pe
tence than even the m ost hostile cahiers charged? W hy operate the mill at
all if not at a profit? Certainly there is som e evidence that lords w hose
rem uneration was inadequate w ere already abandoning som e o f their rights.
But there are also instances o f at least som e lords carrying on, for their
honor, at a lo s s.135 With the proper exam ple in mind the rural proponents o f
reform might w ell have held their plans realistic. M ore strikingly, w e have
the noble cahiers. In their repeated assertions o f concern for honor and
indifference to pecuniary advantage, in their repeated claim s o f willingness
to sacrifice their m aterial advantages for the public interest, w ere they not
inviting such reform s? Their very reticen ce on the seigneurial regim e
may have contributed to a clim ate in which others m ight m istakenly see
acquiescence w here there was only silence. Such is the price o f abstention.
How to Reform the Lord’s Amusements

The Third Estate cahiers have their largest reform m inorities in tw o areas:
first, the hunting rights, but not the other recreational privileges; and
second, the broad range o f dues, both annual paym ents in cash and kind as
well as the mutation fees.
Hunting Rights
We shall treat these tw o areas in turn. Peasants find the hunting rights m ore
w orthy targets o f reform than they do other seigneurial recreations. On
the other hand, they find all the lords’ gam es less reform able than does the
Third E state. In exploring how the cahiers discuss how the lords play, w e
shall seek to understand the distinction drawn betw een hunting and the rest
as well as the gap betw een country people and urban elites. Proposals to
135. Although he used hisjudicial prerogatives with aome effectiveness to enforce his seigneurial
rights, the expenses of the duke de Saubr-Tavanes in maintaining an impressive court and prison
seem to Robert Forster to indicate "that not money but prestige and local pre-eminence were the
duke’s principal motives” (Fotster, Saulx-Tatxmes, 100). Around Toulouse the honor of naming
officers to exercise justice in their names was so coveted that theparlement feh compelled to try to
hah the tendency to wasteful multiplication of judicial personnel (Bastier, Fiodaliti au slide des
httmins, 105).
reform the hunting rights generally have one o f several objectives, which
w e will exam ine in turn.
1. Restrict the season, place, or circumstances of the hunt or limit those
who may exercise the right Am ong restrictions on the conduct o f the hunt
w e find dem ands that the use o f dogs be carefully con trolled,1 138 that
7
1
6
3
peasants’ dogs may not be killed,137 that hunting on horseback in seeded
land be forbidden,138 that birds that kill insect pests not be hunted,139 that
enclosed gardens adjoining dwellings be o ff lim its,140 that only lords with
large estates hunt141 and that hunting rights not be transferred by the
seigneur to another party.142 Such demands for lim iting the {dace and nature
o f the hunt are m ore characteristic o f the urban notables than o f the
country people.
2. Peasants (or other non-lords), under suitable restrictions, shall be
allowed to kill game. This second group o f proposals address them selves
not to the damage wrought by the hunt, but to d ie damage wrought by the
hunt’s quarry. The nobles and Third Estate o f Péronne jointly urge, for
exam ple, that when the quantity o f game exceed s the capacity or desire o f
the lords to control it, the peasants, upon petition to the Adm inistration o f
W aters and F orests, may be perm itted to hunt (under proper supervision)
(A P 5:360). The Third Estate o f Mehm asks for the right to destroy all
rabbits not killed by the lords, using aO m eans short o f firearm s, a restriction
they accept (A P 3:746).
3. Limit the harshness of repression by seigneur or state. A group o f reform
proposals protest the harshness erf the current sanctions against offenders,
w hether the brutality o f the lord and his game wardens or the criminal
penalties o f the state, without necessarily challenging the m onopolistic right
to hunt itself. The Third Estate o f Mehm, for exam ple, dem ands that
seigneurial violence and unjustifiable im prisonm ent be prevented (A P
3:746), while their colleagues o f Chaum ont-en-Bassigny want an alleviation
o f the harsh penalties for infractions (A P 2:727).
4. Facilitate legal defense ofpeasants. H ere w e find a group o f proposals
that, grudgingly or otherw ise, acknow ledge the continued existence o f
hunting rights but insist that seigneurs be liable for damage caused. A s the
136. Third Estate, Alençon, AP 1:714.

137. Third Estate, Chalon-sur-Saône, AP 2:609.
138. Third Estate, Blois, Frédéric Lesueur andAlfred Cauchie, Cahiers de doléances du bailliage
de Blois et du bailliage secondaire deRomorantinpour les îlots ginéraux de 1789 (Blois: Imprimerie
Emanuel Rivière, 1907), 2:453.
139. Third Estate, Digne, AP 3:356.
140. Joint cahier of Nobles and Third Estate of Péronne, 4P 5:360.
141. Third Estate, Orléans, Candle Bloch, ed, Cahiers de doléances dmbailliage (fOrléanspour
les Hatsghtiraux de 1789 (Orléans: Imprimerie Ortéannaise, 1906), 2:332.
142. Third Estate, Clermont-en-Beauvaiais, AP 2:755.
Third Estate o f Orléans puts it, there m ust be penalties for the pow erful
who abuse their rights as well as the pow erless with no rights.143 The Third
Estate o f A uxerre, for exam ple, insists on the legal responsibility o f the
lords for the actions o f their game wardens (A P 2:123) while the Third
E state and nobility o f Përonne jointly demand that peasants m ust find it
easier to sue lords for dam ages; in particular they m ust be able to get a
hearing at a nearby royal— not seigneurial— court (A P 5:360).
5. Finally and m ost interesting o f all, w e find demands that seigneurs fill
the responsibilities that alone justify these rights. Hunting rights are seen not
m erely (and in som e docum ents not at all) as a seigneurial am usem ent but
as a vital public tru st The clearing o f game is necessary and those lords
w ho fail in their duty are to be responsible for the damage w rought not
m erely by their hounds and horses in hunting, but by the gam e animals they
failed to exterm inate. The urban notables o f B elfort e t Huningue, for
exam ple, insist that the royal courts ought to have jurisdiction, in a text in
which it is particularly clear that the lords’ m onopoly is granted for the
fulfillm ent o f a public duty. The lord is not entitled, he is required to kill
game— or else pay up (A P 2:318). The Third Estate o f Château-Thierry,
for their part, find the target o f reform in the current com plexity, expense,
and uncertainty o f legal procedures. T hey demand a drastic sim plification to
make it possible to hold the lords accountable, in actual practice as w ell as
legal principle, so that it no longer will be the case that “ agriculture suffers
im m ense losses, through the ravages o f too abundant gam e. Hunting rights
may not be the right to ruin the hard-working cultivator by perm itting
excessive m ultiplication o f gam e” (A P 2:675).
The idea o f reform ing seigneurial hunting along these lines plainly appeals
less to the villagers than to the non-noble w ell-to-do (see Table 3 .11);
am ong village-sponsored reform s, restricting the circum stances o f the hunt
and forcing lords to kill damaging animals are prom inent The com m unity o f
N orroy, in the bailliage oí Pont-à-M ousson, for exam ple, wants to defend
late sum mer’s ripening crops. Although, they claim , hunting is forbidden
until August 15 Co prevent the exterm ination o f gam e, existing legislation
fails to protect the fields covered with their riches. T hey appeal rather
plaintively for stronger laws, for they are too timid to risk opposing the
incursions o f “ grow n m en carried away by their passion for hunting.” 144 The
peasants o f M olitard, in the bailliage o f B lois, concede the honorific distinc
tion involved in a hunting m onopoly, but strongly demand that the lords do
not exploit this right as a source o f profit: “ One sees . . . with indignation
143. Bloch, Cakiers dOrlians, 2:332-33.

144. Zohan-Etienne Harsany, ed, Cahiers de doléances des bailliages desgénéralités deMetz et de
Nancypour les états généraux de 1789, ser. 1, voL 5, Cahiers deBailliage dtPont-à-Mousson (Paris:
Librairie Paul Hartmann, 1946), 127,128.
the ravages o f gam e; for five or six m onths w e have w atered our fields with
our sw eat, and just at the m om ent when our greatest hopes are excited,
our harvests are utterly d estroy ed .. . . We are nonetheless far from wishing
to strip the nobility and the gentlem en o f the right to hunt which, it seem s,
ought to belong to them exclusively. But let there no longer be any souls
low enough to make an object o f gain out o f what ought only to be an honor.
Let them have the sole right to hunt, let this right be regarded as their
property, but let greed no longer carry them to try to sell gam e for 12 to
15,000 livres. This speculation is iniquitous. ” 145The peasants o f Saint-Cloud-
en-B eauce, in the bailliage o f B lois insist that if the right cannot be abolished,
the lords m ust pay for dam ages: "sin ce it is not just that the harvests be an
unconstrained pasture for gam e which serves nothing but the pleasure o f
the lord s.” 146
Pigeons, Rabbits, Fish

Reform proposals are less com m only enunciated by parishes and Third
Estate in regard to the other recreational privileges. W hen w e exam ine
these proposals, how ever, w e find som e broad sim ilarities to those w e have
discussed. We also find a dramatic and highly significant difference. Peasants
and urban notables propose that there be restrictions on pigeons during
sow ing, harvesting, or other critical periods (som etim es offered as the next
best thing to outright abolition);147 that dovecotes or w arrens be en closed ;148
that the right to raise pigeons or rabbits be restricted (to those with proper
titles, to those with the right o f high ju stice, to those with at least one
145. One takes the enormous sumof money mentioned as a measure of the anger of the countiy
people rather than a statement of how much actually changed hands. See Lesueur and Caudne,
Catien deBlois, 1:369-70.
146. Lesueur and Caudûe, Catien deBlois, 1:318.
147. finishes: Kuntzig inThkmviDe, N. Donnant and P. Lesprand, eds., Catien de doléances des
bailliages des généralités de Metz et de Nancypour les états généraux de 1789, ser. 2, voL 7, Catien
du bailliage de Ttionville (Bar-le Duc and Paris, 1922), 197; Châteauneufin Rennes, Henri Sée and
André Lesort, eds., Catien de doléances de la sénéchausée de Rennes pour les états généraux de
1789 (Rennes: Imprimerie Oberthur, 1911), 3:130; Third Estate, Dieuze, Charles Etienne, ed.,
Catien de doléances des bailliages desgénéralités deMetz et deNancypour les étatsgénéraux de 1789,
ser. 1, voL 2, Cakien du bailliage de Dieuze (Nancy: Imprimerie Berger-Levrauh, 1912), 420;
Etain, Beatrice F. Hyslop, A Guide to the GeneralCatien of1789, with the Texts of UneditedCatien
(NewYork: Octagon Books, 1968), 299.
148. Parishes, St André-sur-CaiDy in Rouen, Boulotseau, Catien de Rouen, 2:248; Gemonvile
in VfezeSse, Charles Etienne, Catien de doléances des bailliages des généralités de Metz et de Nancy
pourles étatsgénéraux de 1789: Catien du bailliage de Vizelize (Nancy: Imprimerie Berger-Levrauh,
1930), ser. 1, 3:163; Third Estate, Autun, Anatole de Charmasse, ed., Catien des paroisses et
communautés du bailliage dAutun pour les états généraux de 1789 (Autun: Imprimerie Dqussieu,
1895); Meaux, AP 3:731.
hundred arpents o f land);14912that the num bers o f pigeons be lim ited.190 O ther
0
5
docum ents demand, should these m easures prove inadequate, that fields
and crops may be defended by killing pigeons and rabbits.151 Still others
insist that the lord be responsible for dam age.152
W hile reform demands concerning rabbit-raising are quite similar, if far
less num erous than those dealing with pigeons, the m onopoly on fishing and
the associated right o f construction o f fishponds are quite different in detail
Although fish don’t eat crops, these dem ands tend to fit into the sam e
broad categories already sketched. It is dem anded, for exam ple, that the
perm issible locations o f fishponds be restricted to avoid floodin g;153 it is
proposed that m oderate fines for infraction be set in a predictable fashion;1541 5
it is dem anded that standards o f p roof in cases o f infraction be tightened.196
Hunting Rights and Other Seigneurial Pleasures

We are now in a position to set reform proposals for hunting rights side by
side with the less frequent demands to m odify other privileged am usem ents.
Com m on to all are proposals to limit dam ages and to reduce the harshness
with which these rights are enforced. But it is alm ost only in regard to the
hunting rights that there is any attem pt to com pel the seigneur to perform a
duty. It is alm ost only with regard to the hunting rights that there is even
the barest acknowledgm ent that there is a public function carried out, even
if inadequately, by the lord. Only the hunting rights are regarded as having
som e purpose other than the am usem ent o f the lord or the m aintenance o f
a status m arker. An occasional cahier o f peasants or urban notables might
acknow ledge grudgingly som e value in the raising o f pigeon s,156 say, or
149. Parishes, TeOy-le-Feneux in Orléans, Bloch, Cahiers ¿Orléans, 123; Han-devant-Pierre-

pont in Longuyon, P. d’Arixm de JubainviBe, Cahiers de doléances des bailliages des Longuyon, de
Longwy et de Villers-la-Montagne pour les ¿tais généraux de 1789 (Nancy: Société d'impressions
Typographiques, 1952), 26; Third Estate, Gien, AP 3:409; Châlons-sur-Marne, Laurent, Cahiers
de Châlons-sur-Marne (Epemay: Imprimerie Henri Vfllers, 1906), 862. The Third Estate of Metz,
curiously, would bar general staff officers from having dovecotes (AP 3:767).
150. Parishes, Grostenquin in Vic, Charles Etienne, ed.. Cahiers de doléances des bailliages des
généralités de Metz et de Nancy, vol 1, Cahiers du bailliage de Vie (Nancy: Imprimerie Berger-
Levrauh), 283; Third Estate, Douai, AP 3:182.
151. Third Estate, ChâtiOon-sur-Seine, AP 2:714.
152. Third Estate, Boulogne-sur-Mer, AP 2:441. The parish of Saint-Dens-Les-Ponts in the
bailliage of Blois offers an option: either everyone should be free to kill rabbits and pigeons or the
lord must be compelled to destroy game on painof being liable for damages (Lesueur and Cauchie,
Cahiers deBlois, 267).
153. Third Estate, Chartres, AP 2:631.
154. Third Estate, Dqon, AP 3:135.
155. Third Estate, Chartres, AP 2:631.
156. Pigeons, in the view of the Third Estate of Château-Thierry, have “a usefulness too widely
recognized to demand their total destruction.” So widely recognized, indeed, that they do not
bother to teOus what that usefulness might be (AP 2:675).
insist on the perform ance o f som e riverine responsibility they associate with
fishing righ ts.157 Their num bers pale before those who recognize the control
o f destructive animals as a vital public responsibility and demand that it be
carried o u t We find, in sh ort that the cahiers distinguish betw een seigneur
ial rights that are m erely a burden and those th at while burdensom e, have
som e point to them .
W hile hunting rights stand out am ong the lord’s am usem ents for their
reform ability, it is the Third E state, far m ore than the peasants, w ho make
these reform proposals. We find, indeed, Third Estate docum ents which
insist th at in som e particulars, the hunting rights o f the lords actually be
extended. The seigneur’s hunting rights, which restricted those o f everyone
else, had in turn been lim ited by certain prerogatives o f the king. The royal
capitaineries w ere preserves within which even the lords could not hunt
without special dispensation. A lord so unfortunate as to have his seigneurie
within one o f these preserves could find his right to hunt quite obliterated.
D eer, m oreover, as royal animals, w ere under special protection in and out
o f capitaineries. The desire to control animal damage som etim es led to the
demand that the royal hunting privileges be abolished or m odified and that
those o f the lords be expanded. The Third Estate o f C répy-en-Valois, for
exam ple, announces that it is fed up with endless discussions o f precisely
which animals cause crop destruction. L et fief-holders kill d eer as w ell as
other gam e, at least away from the capitaineries, and let these royal
preserves them selves be drastically reform ed (A P 3:178).
So vivid, at the beginning o f the Revolution, was the idea that hunting was
a public duty, that even cahiers that argued that the seigneurial m onopoly be
ended might take note o f its rationale. The Third Estate o f Château-Salins,
for exam ple, con cedes that the “ destruction o f gam e is truly n ecessary.”
“ B ut,” they continue, “ it is far from the case that this is the m otive o f the
seigneurs, who do everything they can to multiply [gam e].” 158
We began this section by noting the high propensity for reform proposals
to be advocated for the hunting rights (but not for the other recreational
privileges) by the Third Estate (to a greater extent than the rural parishes).
The exterm ination o f gam e was held to be a present need and not m erely
an outw orn relic o f the p ast One conceivable reform , the im position o f
constraints on the lords, to com pel them to hunt enough as w ell as not to
hunt in a destructive fashion, required a confidence that the judicial system
could actually be used to coerce the seigneurs. The law yers and judges w ho
157. The parish of Lay-St-Christophe (bailliage of Nancy) insists that those who daim the right
to fish have anassociated duty of bridge repair; see JeanGodfrin, Cahiers de doléances des bailliages
desgénéralités deMetz et deNancypour les ttats générauxde 1789, ser. 1, voL 4, Cahiers du bailliage
deNancy (Paris: Librairie Emest Leroux, 1934), 4:230.
158. “Doléances, plaintes et remontrances du tiers état du bafflñge Royal de Château-Sains en
Lorraine,” Annuaire de la SociétéHistorique etArditolagiqueLorraine 16 (1904): 226.
w ere so im portant a com ponent o f the Third E state159 may weD have had
such confidence. It was this confidence that the peasants, w hose experience
o f legal procedures was far m ore frustrating, altogether lacked.
Their confidence in legality w as probably not the only elem ent in the
greater enthusiasm for cleaning up the lord’s gam es on the part o f the Third
Estate than the villagers. A s substantial landholders them selves— or if not
landholders, aspirants to such a state, or related to one, or w hose friends
w ere cme, e tc.— it surely was easier for m em bers o f the urban notability to
imagine them selves sharing in similar diversions. If seigneurial hunts w ere a
m odel o f forbidden pleasures, would not many w ell-off landholders and
w ould-be landholders look to the day when they could invite those they
sought to im press to their ow n hunting party? A property enlightened hunt
(or, in lesser degree, other once-lordly diversions)— which still carried
social exclusion with it— was m ore appealing to the w ell-off than to the
peasants, w ho, while m ore likely to want hunting reform ed than rabbit
raising, w ere nonetheless even m ore inclined to abolition (see Table 3 .4 ).
Periodic Payments and Mutation Rights

W ith regard to both periodic paym ents and mutation rights the Third
E state’s reform ist bent was so much m ore evident than the parishes’. Is
this because a good number o f those in the upper reaches o f the Third
E state could see them selves as lords? The reform ist bent here, in any
event, show s a desire to curb seigneurial “ abuses” while preserving prop
erty, a position that was to infuse the debates on legislation in the m onths
ahead. Reform proposals aim at limiting the lord’s capacity to use these
paym ents as a vehicle for forcing peasants to sell out, som etim es by insisting
on m easures assuring a m ore scrupulous adhesion to individually negotiated
contracts. For exam ple, the period in which arrears may be collected is to
be lim ited, say, to five yea rs.160 Such a m easure would inhibit the seigneurial
practice o f letting arrears accum ulate for up to 29 years, demanding paym ent
159. By Lema/s count, 60% of those elected to the Estates-General by the Third Estate were
legal professionals of some sort judges, lawyers, notaries. Judges from the bailliage courts alone
made up one-fifth of the deputies. Forty-eight Third Estate cahiers were actually drafted by
assemblies that had elected a bailliage magistrate to preside over their deliberations. See Edna
Hinche Lemay, "Les Révélations d’un dictionnaire: du nouveau sur la composition de l’Assemblée
Nationale Constituante (1789-1791),” Annales historiques de la Révolutionfrançaise, no. 284 (1981):
179, for the summary figures. Timothy Tackett suggests an even higher count in Becoming a
Revolutionary: The Deputies of the French National Assembly and the Emergence of a Revolutionary
Culture (1789-1790) (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996). See also Dawson, Provincial
Magistrates, 186-87.
160. Ploèrrnd, AP 5:379; Annonay, AP 2:52.
and then accepting the peasant's holding as settlem ent o f unpayable d e b t161
C ollective communal responsibility for each individual’s (¿»ligations is to
be curtailed.162 Paym ents are to be m ore carefully recorded to avoid
paying tw ice.163
O ther proposals are specific to certain form s o f paym ent O f a heavy
paym ent in kind it was dem anded that it be com m uted into a cash pay
m ent;164 that the lord collect it at the peasant’s fields rather than have the
peasant deliver it to the k>rd;165 and that its relationship to the tithe or to
royal taxes be regulated to avoid ruin.166 The Third proposes exem ptions to
lods et ventes1671689as w ell as rate reductions.166 A s for retrait, the notables o f
Agen propose all the m ajor reform s: that the seigneur cannot assign the
right to another; that retrait cannot be exercised past a certain date; and
that the collection o f lods et ventes bars the exercise o f retrait. 166
It appears, how ever, that these com plex projects had little appeal in the
parishes, even when those proposals would seem clearly to have m et rural
concerns. The greater hold o f reform ism in the Third Estate cahiers
than am ong the parishes for both regular and occasional paym ents seem s
explicable in the sam e fashion as the similar pattern with regard to recre
ational privileges. The urban notables are proposing m ore com plex legal
procedures backed up by access to judicial safeguards. The sam e rem arks
apply to the greater confidence in such processes on the part o f urban elites
(am ong whom legal professionals w ere a w eighty com ponent) and their
greater sense o f them selves as lords or w ould-be lords.
A Note on the Ideological Rationale

for Reform
It is notew orthy that these reform proposals, for the m ost part, w ere
appropriations o f current and available claim s o f how the system w as
161. The Third Estate of PloSnnel characterizes this practice as “the perfidious negligence of
the seigneurs" (AP 5:379).
162. ChâteDerauh, AP 2:696; BeOème, AP 5:328.
163. Chätellerault, AP 2:696.
164. Dourdan, AP 3:253; Etampes, AP 3:285.
165. Cfemiont-en-Beauvasis, AP 2:756,
166. Avesnes, AP 2:153.
167. Hennebont, P. Thomas-Lacroix, Les cahiers de doléances de la sinéchausie dHermebont
(Extrait de Mémoires de la Société dHistoire et d,Archéologie de Bretagne, voL 25) (Rennes:
Imprimerie Bretonne, 1955), 89; Auray, AP 6:116.
168. Calais, AP 2:512; Toul, AP 6:13.
169. Agen, AP 1:668.
supposed to w ork: daim s found in com pilations o f custom ary law, daim s
found in judicial rulings, claim s found in the manuals o f the feudistes. If actual
practice deviated from legalistic principle, if the principles o f one province
differed from those o f another, if the restraints and restrictions that lim ited
seigneurial burdens in the idealistic w orld o f law yers’ docum ents diverged
from a m ore dreary reality, the urban notables and, to a lesser extent, the
country people could find ammunition for reform ing without destroying the
seigneurial regim e. Custom ary law frequently lim ited hunting rights to fief-
holders or lords with the right o f high justice; in Burgundy, the seigneurs
w ere held to be forbidden to hunt in the enclosed fields o f their dependents;
an edict o f 1780 ruled, against the regulations o f the com te d’A rtois, that
the dogs o f their dependents could not be killed; a royal ordinance o f 1669
forbade hunting during grow ing season; hunting rights, w idely regarded as
honorific, w ere not, in a w idespread law yer's view , to be farm ed out for
cash; dovecotes w ere barred for those in possession o f too little land to
support them .170 Such idealized portraits o f the system constituted a source
to be drawn upon in the search for reform .
Reforming Nobles: How Elite

Reforms Differ
Tables 3.11 and 3.12 show that the nobles w ere every bit as likely to
propose reform s in those rights as w ere the others, yet a reading o f their
docum ents finds a shading that slips through the statistical analysis. T heir
reform s w ere d ifferen t It is not so much that they proposed changes which
w ere in no way advocated by the peasants or urban notables; indeed, their
reform s drew on the sam e fund o f ideas. But if the nobles' them e was
com m on, it was nonetheless a them e with variations. The nobles o f Sens,
for exam ple, would have restricted pigeon-raising to those w hose claim s to
dovecotes could be validated by proper titles.171 The nobility o f A ix em
braced the com m on Third Estate demand that hunting rights not be rented
out (4P 1:694). T hese are com m on enough demands o f the Third E state,
but was not a part o f their special appeal to the nobility their em brace o f the
sym bolic trappings o f the seigneurial regim e? The point o f these proposals
for the many parish and Third Estate assem blies advocating them was
clearly to limit destruction. But when taken up by a noble assem bly, one
suspects the appeal o f the gratifications o f exclusivity, to maintain an
airborne status m arker that functioned like the wearing o f a sw ord, or the
170. See Garaud, Révolution ¿propriétéfoncière, 87-101.

171. Charles Forée, Cahiers de doléances du bailliage de Sens pour les états généraux de 1789
(Auxerre: Imprimerie Coopérative Ouvrière “L'Universelle,” 1906), 820.
D ible 3 .1 2 . Noble Documente Demanding That Seigneurial

Rights Be Reformed (% )
Right* Nobility
Periodic dues
Cens 29% (7)
Champart 22 (9)
Periodic dues in general 40 (5)
Monopolies in general 27 (15)
Seigneurial tolls 10 (39)
Dues on fairs and markets 17 (6)
Dues on property transfers (hods et ventes) 33 (6)
Justice
Seigneurial courts in general 22 (27)
Seigneurial courts, miscellaneous 18 (17)
Hunting rights 37 (27)
Right to raise pigeons 17 (12)
Right to bear arms 13 (30)
Honorific rights 10 (21)
Fealty and homage (Foi et hommage) 33 (9)
Avowal and enumeration (Aveu et dénombrement) 33 (9)
Symbolic deference patterns in general 0 (27)
Serfdom
Mainmorte 60 (5)
Serfdom in general 14 (7)
Other
Compulsory labor services 15 (13)
Miscellaneous right 10 (20)
Regime in general 12 (34)
•Rights discussed in at least 5 Noble cahiers.
construction o f a gallow s, or the display o f a w eathervane. The sam e

demand appealed to a peasant wish for damage control, a Third Estate ideal
o f fostering econom ic developm ent, and a noble concern for honor.
Consider now the nobles o f Laon, who accepted that the lords have a
duty as w ell as a right to hunt and w ho accepted as well that damage caused
by the hunt or by failure to hunt ought to be made good. But in accepting
these principles, they add som ething o f their ow n:
The right to hunt is to be reserved as the property o f the seigneur

on his lands. The bearing o f arms is to be prohibited in view o f the
abuses and the dangers, both civil and political. But at the slightest
com plaint addressed by the tillers to the Provincial E states concern
ing the ravages o f gam e and the indiscretion o f the hunters, the
E states shall im m ediately name as agents an equal num ber o f gentle
m en and tillers. T h ese agents shall verify the damage and they shall
not only determ ine the com pensation to award, but shall even order
the destruction o f overabundant gam e. Their judgm ent shall be
executed without appeal; and by the sam e token they shall have the
pow er to pronounce a fine— to be turned over to the adm inistration
o f poor relief— against anyone w ho brought a frivolous com plaint
(4 P 6:143)
The gentlem en o f Laon stressed their m onopolies on hunting and on

guns. That they have a duty to hunt is clearly im plicit W here the peasants
spoke o f the catastrophic destructiveness o f the hunt these nobles acknowl
edged “ indiscretion.” The w idespread demand that seigneurs be liable for
damage was conceded, but seriously w eakened. The Provincial E states—
often repositories o f privilege— shall name a com m ission half o f whom are
n obles;172 and the com m ission is to fine peasants w ho com plain with no good
reason. Given the long experience o f fruitless legal struggle over seigneurial
rights, how many peasant com m unities would have felt protected by such a
procedure? Perhaps Laon's privileged expected their inferiors to be gratified
that the fines w ere to go to charity rather than into their ow n pockets.
If the nobles o f Laon w ere lucid on the reasons for keeping access to
w eapons within social boundaries but spoke delicately o f “ indiscretions,”
other nobles adopted a stance o f vagueness. The nobles o f Châteauneuf-en-
Thym erais boldly described game as “ one o f the m ost terrible scou rges o f
agriculture.” They then observed that “ pow erful considerations appear to
oppose the proposition that hunting be freely available for all classes o f
society” without specifying what these “pow erful considerations” w ere (4 P
2:643). A different form o f reticen ce was exhibited by the nobles o f Am iens.
T hey instructed their deputies to consent to all ordinances that restrict the
num ber o f pigeons without, how ever, actually proposing any (4 P 1:741).
What was explicitly em braced in Am iens was im plicitly characteristic o f the
nobles’ reform proposals taken as a w hole: they w ere reacting to an agenda
set by others. Even when their deputies w ere told to vote for som e o f the
sam e m easures advocated by the Third E state, the nobles w ere going along;
they w ere trying to limit their dam age, they w ere attem pting to reassert
their claim s to honor while under fire, and they sound evasive. It is not
their agenda.
One o f the options perm itted in drafting cahiers occasionally allow s a
172. This cahierdemands that Provincial Estates «äst throughout France (AP 6:140).
unique glim pse into the intense national dialogue taking place in 1789. The
clergy, nobility, and Third Estate w ere allowed to ch oose to draft cahiers in
com m on, an opportunity o f which a small num ber o f assem blies availed
them selves. Som etim es tw o, som etim es all three, orders collaborated on a
te x t Som e o f these attem pts at a unified docum ent, how ever, failed in
w hole or in part and left us a fascinating record o f the points o f disagreem ent
hi B ourg-en-B resse, the clergy, nobility, and Third E state acknow ledged
their differences. The Third Estate proposes: “ that every landowner be
perm itted to kill wiki animals that he finds am ong his crops without incurring
a fine. To this effect, every inhabitant shall be allowed to have fire-arm s at
hom e.” The nobles respond to these not unusual proposals: "P reserve in
its entirety the right o f hunting. . . . Maintain the laws o f the realm that
restrict the bearing o f arm s, and solicit a regulation that will prevent the
crop damage caused by the large number o f wild animals” (4 P 2:460). In
this bailliage the noble response to a challenge to seigneurial prerogatives is
to assert the claim s o f privilege, and to wish for a “regulation”— they
propose none them selves— to solve the problem .173 The specific demand o f
the Third Estate o f B ourg-en-B resse and the vagueness o f the nobility in
response are both reform proposals— but how different they a re.174
Peasants and Nobles Protect Themselves;

The Third Estate Opts for Lawsuits
We see that the parishes, Third E state, and nobility are rem arkably similar
in the proportion o f reform proposals put forw ard (Table 3 .1 ); w e also see
that this sim ilarity conceals great differences in the spirit m oving the
reform s: a peasantry concerned with paying less, a nobility concerned
with conserving its position, an urban upper stratum concerned with legal
rem edies. One finds regions o f agreem ent and possibilities o f future coopera
tion am ong these groups; and possibilities o f future division as w ell
The peasant lack o f interest in seeking am elioration through m echanism s
173. If it is not putting too fine a point on it, the structure of the nobles’ prose seems to urge
something even weaker. Since “sotidt” is used parallel to “preserve” and “maintain,” they seem to
be urging not an unspecified regulation, but merely that such a regulation be solicited. The clergy,
for their part, responded by consenting to the proposal erfthe Third, but insistingthat the permission
for private possession of firearms be stricken from the grievance. Since they don’t propose an
alternate method of killing animal nuisances, one wonders whether the derics of Bourg-en-Bresse
pictured the peasants attacking rabbits with hoes or catching birds with their hands.
174. Once ajpin the evidence is inconsistent with Cobban’s picture of a Third Estate virtually
indistinguishable from the nobiEty on seigneurial rights. Had Cobban actually examined the cakien
of the nobdity, he might have seen how different were the views of the urban notables.
o f legal enforcem ent and their desire for rate reduction are not independent
facets o f their m entality. A distrust o f their capacity to utilize the judicial
apparatus175 to com pel the lords to do som ething or to com pel them not to
d o som ething is quite com patible with the form o f relief they do seek. If rate
reduction is the rule, then legal relief would frequently becom e the problem
o f the lords. If the lord is unhappy about the reduced rate at which the
peasants propose to pay, the invocation o f legal procedures would be his
problem , not theirs. The peasants in short are reluctant, com pared to the
Third, am ong whom legal professionals w ere so significant, to m odify the
seigneurial regim e in directions w hose realization would depend on legal
initiatives on their p art The Third is, by contrast, relatively enthusiastic
about such procedures. They are m ore likely to trust the abstract pow er o f
the Law; they have m ore confidence that judicial procedures can constrain
the lords; and, let us not forget, som e o f the lawyers and judges am ong
them are hardly averse to the creation o f litigation. M any o f the Third
E state reform s would prom ote peasant suits against seigneurs; these m ight,
as the proposals suggest, benefit the peasants, but they would be sure to
benefit their urban attorneys.176 "L et’s you and him fight” might be a good
maxim for law yers. If w e lode ahead from the spring o f 1789 to the ensuing
history o f revolutionary legislation on seigneurial rights, w e shall see how
large a role w as played by (m e or another enactm ent em pow ering peasants
to sue for their claim s—and how lim ited w as peasant assent to such a
fram ework (see Chapters 8 and 9 ).
A National Dialogue
In understanding the positions taken (or the subjects avoided) by the
assem blies that gathered in the spring o f 1789, I have often treated these
statem ents (and silen ces) as strategically conceived, delivered in particular
circum stances, for particular audiences, to attain particular ends. T he
nobles’ reform notions, for exam ple, w ere described as reactive. T he
nobility o f Soule w ere not very appreciative o f the contributions o f others to
the debate: “ The Third Estate, exalted by circum stances, disregarding our
sacrifices and contem ptuous o f the sacred rights o f property, dem ands the
175. The people of EtioOes (in Paris-hors-fes-murs) describe their experience of administrative
andjudicial protection. When one protests, they write, “one is told there are rules to take care of
it, the rules must be followed.” (They have been complaining of the prohibition on mowing hay
before June 24 in order to protect often nonexistent partridge eggs.) SeeAP 4:541.
176. To the extent that we see, with Cobban, the Third Estate as themselves seigneurs, we
might also suppose that some support for such measures lay in the hope that they wouldn’t work,
that the country people would be unable to mount ajudicial defense.
suppression o f this right” (4 P 5:779). M ore generally, the assem blies w ere
responding to their sense o f the positions o f others, crucial data in consider
ing what it would be shrew d and what it would be prudent to say on eself.
The making o f the cahiers took place against a background o f m inisterial
reform , parlem entary pronouncem ent, an avalanche o f pam phlets, the in
tense cam paign to influence the content o f the cahiers,171 and finally the
debates o f the tens o f thousands o f assem blies them selves. Som e o f the
broad characteristics o f the interactive quality o f the grievance-generating
process show s up in a few sim ple statistical tabulations.
• The correlation o f the proportion o f parish docum ents urging abolition

without com pensation and the num ber o f Third Estate cahiers treating
a seigneurial right is .4 4 .1
1781
7 9That is to say, the Third Estate is likely to
7
discuss precisely those rights concerning w hose elimination the parishes
are m ost vociferous. W hen the parishes are m ost adamant, the Third
E state feels it has to say som ething, even if only to offer a different pro
posal.
• The nobility demands anything other than maintenance when the Third
Estate discusses a right with som e frequency. The correlation o f the
proportion o f noble docum ents insisting on m aintenance and the num ber
o f Third Estate cahiers discussing a seigneurial subject is -.6 9 ;m the
correlations o f the proportions advocating virtually anything else and
the extent o f Third Estate discussion are positive and significant:
abolition without com pensation (.5 0 ), indem nification (.6 1 ) and reform
(.5 6 ).180
The urban notables, then, appear to be careful to say som ething about
institutions to which rural France is m arkedly hostile while the nobles are
m ost reluctant to advocate preserving unchanged the institutions w idely
attacked by others. It i§ this diffidence, I suggest, rather than indifference
that underlies the silence o f the Second Estate. This may add som ething to
our understanding o f the nobles’ attachm ent to their sym bolic prerogatives:
it was perhaps in this realm , o f relatively little interest to the Third E state
and o f next to no interest to the parishes that the nobles dared to express
their w ishes.
177. It has sometimes been suggested that seigneurial rights were not so much discussed in the
pre-electoral explosion of opinion. (See Garnit), Révolution etpropriétéfoncière, 159-60.) Our data,
however, suggest that the parishes, Third Estate, andnobles hadsome knowledge of andsensitivity
to one another’s concerns.
178. Computed for the 27 institutions discussed inat least 10 parish cdúen (p < .05).
179. Computed for the 12 institutions discussed inat least 10 noble cakien(p< .01).
180. For aBthree correlations, p < .05.
Peasants Assess Their Burdens

That utility is a significant criterion for the evaluation o f their burdens
perm its us to throw som e m ore light on the vexing subject o f indem nifica
tion. I tried to show above that the ease with which a m onetary equivalent
may be associated with a seigneurial right helps explain why the village
assem blies preferred indemnifying som e rights to others. W hether or not it
is easy to arrive at a quantitative determ ination, how ever, one w onders
w hether all rights w ere seen as m orally w orthy o f com pensation. If the
French countryside clearly distinguished rights that w ere tied to genuine
services from those that w ere not, is it conceivable that they also distin
guished rights that deserved indem nification from those that did not? If so,
the choice o f indem nification is not only a technical question o f the feasibility
o f calculating a cash value but a m oral question o f the legitim acy o f the
seigneurial claim . C onsider these observations o f a com m unity in B igorre:
“ Som e charges and new rights w ere introduced solely by the force and
authority o f the lord over the w eakness and ignorance o f their vassals. We
insist that the form er establishm ent o f these rights m ust be justified as the
concession o f som e advantage, because one cannot establish charges on one
side except in consideration o f a paym ent or advantageous concession cm
the other. In the case o f such concessions, the inhabitants may redeem
these charges by returning the capital.” 181
Indem nification is reserved for rights that are w orthy o f re s p e ct182 In the
case o f this particular com m unity, what m akes them w orthy is the existence
o f som e genuine service. The broad rural position on seigneurial rights that
em erges from this study o f the cahiers is com plex. W hen those rights are
seen as paym ents in return for nothing they w ere to be abolished. Rights
that w ere once attached to services w ere m ore w orthy o f indem nification
than those that w ere always coerced , but the question o f indem nification
also depended on w hether a m onetary equivalent was plausible. T hose
rights that might still be linked to services in the eighteenth century,
how ever, also attracted som e reform proposals intended to make those
services real.
Reform proposals about ecclesiastical paym ents or seigneurial rights,
then, w ere focu sed on rights seen bound to the perform ance o f vital public
services; one distinctive thrust o f many o f these proposals was to assure
that the service was actually carried o u t The problem atic aspect in the cases
o f ecclesiastical paym ents and seigneurial rights was not the distribution o f
181. Balende, Cahiers de doUances de la sínichausíe deBigom pour Us itats généraux de 1789
(Tartes: Imprimerie Lesbordes, 1925), 580-81.
182. The National Assembly similarly distinguished legitimate from ¡legitimate seigneurial rights;
see Chapter 8.
the burden at all, but rather the assurance o f getting what one pays for. For
those for whom traditional m odes o f financing services by paym ents to a
local individual or corporate body are no longer to be trusted at all or for
those to whom the advancing capacity o f the central authority suggests
alternate m eans o f provision, one might as well do away with the prevailing
m odes altogether. Justice can be provided by the state and financed by
som e centralized body, perhaps out o f taxes as welL
But taxes them selves are different: w e find few er proposals to abolish
them and the equity issues center on w ho will pay the unavoidable. In the
tense and expectant spring o f 1789, as the steeply rising price o f bread made
all other paym ents unusually difficult to contem plate, the rural com m unities
nonetheless clearly differentiate the state’s due from the church’s and the
lord’s. To what degree may one see this distinction as the successful
accum ulation o f a certain m easure o f legitim acy by the m odem state in
which its claim s (Hi resou rces are experienced as so many m ore or less
justified m eans to support vital services? In such a view , the lords’ entire
position may be held to have been radically undermined by the successful
seizure by the state o f the role o f provider o f such serv ices.183 To what
183. The classic argument for this position is that of Alexis de TocquevBe (Old Regime and
Revolution). The geographic patterning of antiseigneurial revolts permits a test of TocqueviDe’s
argument in Chapter 7. For recent evidence that increasing state tutelage over rural communities
was not only undermining the lord’s position but actively encouraging peasant resistance to
seigneurial rights through the mediumof lawsuits, a resistance moreover increasingly assuming the
form of an attack on an abstract conception of "seigneurial rights” as illegitimate (rather than
quarrels about specific claims), see Root, Peasants andKing, 155-204. Although the assertion that
peasant communities were increasingly prone to sue their lords seems to have become anaccepted
fact among historians, a fact which no longer needs to be bolstered by citing evidence, there are
few studies that, like Root’s, have actually deployed such evidence, and these few do not always
dearly distinguish suits initiated by peasants from those initiated by lords, generally present no
tabulations to support what is surely a quantitative daim, and do not always compare the frequency
of the lawsuits late in the century with some earlier period. Nonetheless, these studies are at least
suggestive, and do converge on the same conclusion. See Yves Castan, "Attitudes et motivations
dans les conflits entre seigneurs et communautés devant le Parlement de Toulouse au XVlIIe
siècle,” in Villes de tEurope méditerranéenne et de TEurope occidentale duMoyenAge auXIXe siècle.
Actes du Colloque de Nice (27-28 Mai 1969) (Nice: Centre de la Mediterranée Moderne et
Contemporaine, 1969), 233-39; L TVénard, "Communication de M. TVénard,” in L'abolition de la
féodalité dans le monde occidental (Paris: Editions du Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique,
1971), 589-605; Gutton, Villages du Lyonnais, 88-90; Wolfgang Schmale, Bäuerlicher Widerstand,
Gerickteund Rechtsentwicklung in Frankreich: Untersuchungen zu Prozessen zwischen Bauern und
Seigneurs vor dem Parlament von Paris (16.-18. Jahrhundert) (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann,
1986). For some evidence on an increase in anti-tithe litigation as well, see Georges Frêche,
Toulouse et la région Midi-Pyrénées au siècle des lumières vers 1670-1789 (Paris: Ciqas, 1976),
539-40. Finally, peasant communities in Languedoc sometimes successfully sued to have "noble”
land reclassified as "common” land, and thereby subject to the nugor direct tax, the taille; see Emile
Appoiis, Le diocèse civil deLodève: Etude administrative et économique (Mm: Imprimerie Coopérative
du Sud-ouest, 1951), 90-92. Although evidence of peasant litigation on tithes and tax privileges
does not directly bear on the existence of a legal front in an antiseigneural struggle, it does at least
degree may one see this as the sense o f hopelessness that m akes the state
seem m erely inevitable, after the bloody defeats o f the great antifiscal
risings o f the seventeenth century? The statistical tabulations presented
here p ose that question, but they do not answ er it
François H incker has argued that prior to the eighteenth century when
the lord and the priest w ere known figures o f the rural w orld, and figures
from whom som e services w ere expected, seigneurial dues and church
tithes w ere less intolerable than taxes. The state was to o abstract, too
distant, not concretized in a living provider for com munity n eed s.*184 If so,
our data show a radical shift in outlook. It is unfortunately not possible to
com pare the parish cahiers o f 1789 in any system atic way to their closest
analogues from earlier Estates-GeneraL But R oger Chartier's research
m akes it possible to do so at least for the bailliage o f TVoyes in 1614. If one
com pares shifts in the proportion o f demands falling under C hartier's various
rubrics it is striking that the largest rise in demands is under “ seigneurial
rights,” which (counting them together with “ tithes”) clim b from a scant 3%
in 1614 to 11% in 1789 (175 years later). All his com bined tax categories fall
from 48% to 33% .185 S o concerns with seigneurial exactions w ere up, and
with state exactions, down, betw een France’s penultim ate and its final
Estates-GeneraL M y data suggest, m oreover, that far m ore striking than
any shift in how frequently seigneurial rights are discussed— taxation is still
far m ore w idely taken up than seigneurial rights in 1789— is a new way o f
dealing with them : they are to be reform ed.186
A s for the tithes, they are not very significant in Chartier’s counts for the
grievances o f 1614, in spite o f a m easurably rising burden. The key issue,
then, was peasant demand for a greater and m ore orderly presence o f the
church in the countryside. The early seventeenth-century church w as too
sparse and scattered as w ell as too poorly controlled (an organizational
failure that show s up in demands that the ill-educated and dissolute clerics
fill their proper roles). To get the service, Chartier’s villagers o f 1614 w ere
willing to pay. By 1789 village France had much m ore contact with an
internally reform ed church (now it was the clerics w ho com plained o f the
state o f peasant m orality); the rural issues turned to the efficiency with
which paym ents got what they should.187
show rural communities capable of mounting legal chaBenges to extractors of resources, that
sometimes, one should think, included the lords.
184. Hincker, Lesfrançais devant l'impôtsous ÍAncien Régime (Paris: Flammarion, 1971), 17-18.
185. Roger Chartier, “De 1614 à 1789: le déplacement des attentes,” in Roger Chartier and
Denis Richet, eds., Représentation et vouloir politiques: Autour des états-généraux de 1614 (Paris:
Editions de l'Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, 1962), 110.
186. The degree to which the brunt of anti-tax hostility is borne by the indirect taxes is another
feature in which the cahiers oí 1789 appear to differ from their predecessors of 1614. The greater
acceptability of the direct taxes is a sign of the increased acceptance of the state. See Chartier, “De
1614 à 1789.”
187. Chartier, "De 1614 à 1789,” 104.
We may summarize the lesson o f these calls for reform : for those w ho
favor an im provem ent in taxation, a frequent critical issue is to assure that
all pay as equal citizen s;1Wfor those who favor an im provem ent in seigneurial
or ecclesiastical assessm ents, a critical issue is to assure the perform ance
o f a service. In a justly fam ous essay, F rederic Lane characterized certain
state activities as a protection ra ck et1® What one obtained in return for
payment o f taxes was m erely to be spared state coercion . The French
villages in 1789 w ere calling for dismantling the racket, but they accepted
paym ents that purchased genuine protection. The droit de contrôle, for
exam ple, paid for the validity o f legal docum ents. And even w here protection
was seen as having turned into a racket, as with som e o f the lord’s claim s,
sa n e villagers still wanted the service back. The indirect taxes resem bled
the paym ents to the lord in their perm eation by private interest rather than
public service. Yet, w here public service w as recognized, even indirect
taxes could attract reform proposals.
Is the acceptance o f the state that one finds in the parish assem blies no
m ore than strategically calibrated public discourse, given the unchallengeable
pow er now in the hands o f the state's servitors? O r do the peasants even in
private see the state as the locus o f valued actions, valued enough so that,
suitably reform ed, a taxation system is actually now accepted? W hen parish
assem blies treat state exactions differently from the claim s o f church and
lord, do w e need to be careful to distinguish the public transcript from
the hidden on e?1 190 The insurrectionary actions o f French peasants in the
9
1
8
breakdown o f authority when taxes, tithes, and seigneurial rights could all
be defied may give us sa n e du es in the chapters ahead (see Chapters 5
and 6).
Unstructured Resentment
An assem bly som etim es conplains o f an institution without telling us
w hether it should be abolished, replaced, reform ed; indeed, without any
specific proposal at a ll We count such grievances under the heading
“unfavorable.” Glancing back at Table 3.1 w e see that these am orphous
188. There has been some interesting theoretical work on taxation systems that also sees
conceptions of citizenship emerging out of the conflict of rulers and taxpayers. See Margaret Levi,
OfRule andRevenue (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1988) and Robert
H. Bates and Da-Hsiang Donald Lien, "A Note on Taxation, Development and Representative
Government,” Mitics andSociety 14 (1985): 53-70.
189. Frederic Lane, "Economic Consequences of Organized Violence,” Venice and History: The
CollectedPapers ofFrederic C. Lane (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1966), 412-28.
190. James Scott, Domtnadon and the Arts of Resistance (New Haven: Yale University Press,
1990).
expressions o f hostility are m ost characteristic o f the peasantry and som e

what m ore so with regard to their burdens than for other institutions. Vague
expressions o f approval o f an institution also occur, but much less com m only;
when the subject is their burdens, these diffuse expressions o f approval
(“ favorable") are virtually nonexistent in the countryside. T here is no rural
reserve o f goodw ill to be tapped or shaped by the conservative forces in the
struggles to com e: those who do not already favor preservation are not
likely to com e to do s o .191
On the other hand, there was a substantial reservoir o f ill will tow ard Old
Regim e burdens that had not yet been transform ed into a vision for specific
action. The struggle for the political allegiance o f the countryside was not
over in the spring o f 1789. Especially when it cam e to their burdens, then,
not all rural com m unities had form ulated specific actions by the spring o f
1789, even though they had far m ore ill-w ill than benevolence. One sees
here how m ore m oderate and m ore radical revolutionaries might both have
seen the possibility o f appealing to the countryside. I have tried to show
that their cahiers reveal a peasantry that has thought far m ore carefully
about ju st what they want done and precisely about which burden than has
always been recognized, although w e also see here a significant infusion o f
com plaining that was not fully thought through. On this point, the present
evidence supports Taylor in stressing the degree to which popular sentim ent
was in flux, and that it was not fixed and frozen when the Estates-G eneral
was convoked. But the range o f options had its lim its: the unform ed
sentim ent is on the hostile side.
The revolutionary leadership could w ell have imagined the possibility o f
appeasing the countryside short o f outright and im m ediate abolition o f the
seigneurial rights. If one hopes that the sentim ent behind “unfavorable”
might settle for indem nification and adds those w ho wanted it from the
beginning as w ell as those favoring reform , one might imagine a substantial
counterw eight to the m ore radical peasants. This was a terribly m istaken
calculation: the great increase in rural risings after 1789 suggests that the
undecided but hostile elem ent m oved tow ard the extrem e.
Parochialism
We have been treating the cahiers as if the geographic scop e o f all demands
is the sam e and as if all refer to the entire territory o f France, yet a
significant m inority quite explicitly restrict them selves to their tow n, village,
191. Amorphous demands that someone do some utterly unspecified action are not only less
uncommon for the nobility but also quite scarce.
or province. Table 3.1 show s that the country people w ere the m ost likely
to state that they w ere addressing som e local concern. One might see this
as another indication o f the absence o f a fully articulated political position
among the parishes in the spring o f 1789. Yet this localization is quite se
lective.
Com paring their view s o f the three burdens, the parishes w ere consider
ably less likely to see taxes as a purely local m atter. T hey did not live in a
m orally isolated rural w orld. This again suggests that there has been a
(possibly bitter) acceptance that the French state w as here to stay. The
peasants, m oreover, w ere the least likely to have a provincial orientation
when they lack a local one—and particularly so when they speak o f their
burdens. The days when regional nobles and peasants united in broad
m ovem ents against royal claim s, especially financial ones (so striking in
som e o f the great risings o f the seventeenth century) seem hopelessly
archaic, even in the environm ent o f 1789 made favorable by the regim e’s
collapse. N ot only w ere tax grievances, w idespread though they may have
been, shot through with reform ism in the villages, but rural com m unities
that did not think o f their grievances in a local context may have been
thinking in a national, not a regional, on e.192 The defense o f regional privilege
is not (no longer? not yet?) a part o f their idiom erf grievance.193
To the extent that the parishes did articulate the local demands bounded
by the horizons o f the village, they w ere surely (Hi a different plane than the
192. Only 33% of parish cahiers have any grievances about “this province,” as compared to 78%
of the documents of the nobles. On the other hand, 66% of the rural assemblies have at least one
grievance in which a national question is discussed only at the local level (“abolish the gabelle in our
village”) and 21% contain at least one strictly local complaint (“the next village rings its church bells
too loudly”). Alan Forrest also has some pertinent observations on the absence of a peasant
provincial identity in “Regionalismand Counter-Revolution inFrance,” in Cohn Lucas, ed., Rewriting
the French Revolution (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), 157-59, 165-67. See also Albert Soboul,
“De l’Ancien Régime à la Révolution: Problème régional et réalités sodales,” in Christian Gras and
Georges Uvet, eds., Régions et régionalisme en France du dix-huitième siècle à nos jours (Paris:
Presses Universitaires de France, 1977) and Fernand Braudel, L'identité de la France (Paris:
Flammarion, 1986), 1:40. The evidence presented here is not consistent with daims inthe literature
to the effect that “most Frenchmen, especially those who lived in pays <fétats,” thought “of
themselves as belonging to a province rather than to some abstraction known as France,” a
proposition for which the author presents no evidence; see Norman Hampson, “The Idea of the
Nation in Revolutionary France,” in Alan Forrest and PeterJones, ReshapingFrance: Town, Country
andRegion during the French Revolution (Manchester Manchester University Press, 1991), 13.
193. It is only the nobdity who evince a regional perspective to any significant degree, although
they are less provincial in this literal sense than the rural communities are parochial The restriction
of regional consciousness to elites perhaps helps explain the weakness of separatist and autonomist
movements under the Revolution even though much conflict was structured in regional terms. By
way of comparison consider the Russian Revolution of 1917, which led to the secession of Finland,
Poland, and the Baltic states and defeated separatist movements in Ukraine, Transcaucasia, and the
Muslimregions; the Soviet upheaval that began in the 1980s is proving to be even more spectacular
from this point of view.
nobility who em erge as the least locally oriented grouping. If the seigneurial
regim e is experienced locally by the rural com m unity, the nobility on the
edge o f revolution are not, in their public language, open to talking o f the
con crete, specific village at a ll Peasants do not join in noble regionalism and
nobles do not join in peasant parochialism .194 If w e think o f the degree to
which many a noble fortune still rested on land, the nobles appear, in relation
to their historic roots, not m erely alocal but delocalized. It is in this context
that w e can fully appreciate Tim othy T ackett's discovery that nearly 40% o f
noble deputies to the National Assem bly w ere actually Parisian residents,
elected by their fellow s in som e electoral jurisdiction w here they or their
kin held p roperty.195 In their cahiers as in their choice o f deputies the
collective sen se o f their ow n identity o f F rance's nobility tow ard the onset
o f the slide into the revolutionary chasm found little place for the everyday
concreteness o f a specific rural place.
W hile a m ajority o f parish assem blies som etim es explicitly restricted their
vision to their ow n local w orld, they did not express m ost o f their grievances
in this restrictive vein; still less did they speak o f their province. T he
geographic scope o f m ost grievances (and o f all grievances in a significant
m inority o f cahiers) is unstated. W ere they thinking o f France as a w hole?
What w e may assert at a minimum is that they use language that might w ell
have a national scope when they have shown them selves quite capable erf
narrow ly delim iting their com plaints. And w e saw above how many villages
sharply distinguished custom s duties on transit goods within France from
those duties collected at the frontiers. T here is room to debate how truly
national an orientation may be attributed to them , but w e are surely
observing an awareness beyond the village that w as largely indifferent to
the province.
Tocqueville’s summary o f his reading o f the parish cahiers alm ost antici
pates our data— but not quite:
W hen the peasants cam e to ask each other what their com plaints
should be about they cared not for the balance o f pow ers, for the
guarantees o f political liberty, for the abstract rights o f man and
citizen. T hey dw elt at once cm objects close to them selves, on
burdens which each o f them had had to endure. One thought o f the
feudal dues which had taken half o f his last year’s crops; another o f
194. Since the electoral process forced the urban notables to deal with rural delegates at the
bailliage level, it is not possible to use our data to tefl whether town lawyers, dty officials, and
guild-masters would have otherwise been more receptive to the country people on this score than
thenobility.
195. Only some 20% actually lived in their châteaux. See Timothy Tackett, “Nobles and Third
Estate in the Revolutionary Dynamic of the National Assembly, 1789-1790,” American Historical
Review 94 (1989): 276.
the days he had been com pelled to w ork for his landowner w ithout
pay. One spoke of the lord’s pigeons which had picked his seed from
the ground before it sprouted; another o f the rabbits which had
nibbled his green com . A s their excitem ent rose with the com m on
recitation o f their m iseries, to them all these evils seem ed to proceed
not so much from institutions as from a particular single person w ho
still called them his subjects though he had long ceased to govern
th em .___ And to see in him the com m on enem y was the passionate
agreem ent that grew .196
Yes, the data show peasant preoccupation with their burdens in their
con crete everyday reality. But no, they do not show a peasantry carried
away by em otion, blind to institutions, focusing on the local lord. A far m ore
reasoned evaluation o f the seigneurial system is what w e have seen, and
one grounded in notions o f justice and equity. If it was the local lord whom
rural militants attack, the parish cahiers show us not so much a personalized
enem y, but a generally malignant social system , with the lord m erely the
occupant o f a social role to be redefined by ending its diseased aspects and
strengthening its few healthy ones. If w e are not carried away by T ocque-
ville’s eloquence, let us note how rare is the parish cahier that actually
named the local lord. On this Tocqueville got it alm ost exactly backward: it
was not so m uch a particular single person as a social institution from which
evils p roced ed .197 N otice that Tocqueville’s vivid language has the peasants
as individuals thinking their grievances through individually and then dis
covering that their fellow s think alike. He does not see them as social
beings, as m em bers o f a com munity w ell aware o f each other’s positions
prior to assem bling to thrash out a collective, political, strategic statem ent;
still less does his language, in this passage, suggest a com m unity with
experience o f law yers and tax-collectors, and a long, close experience o f
seigneurial rights.
Seigneurial Rights and Public Service

For Tocqueville, the legitim acy o f seigneurial authority in the past had rested
upon the provision o f vital services. A s the greedy central state gathered
public responsibility to itself, the weakened tords w ere no longer able to
196. Alexis de TocqueviOe, TheEuropeanRtvohUkmandCorrespondent* with Gobàuau (Garden

City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1959), 82.
197. For corroborating evidence from a study of the targets of anrtarignrurial actions, see
Chapter 5, p. 228.
justify their privileges. Both the envious class o f the w ell-off but unprivileged
as w ell as the angry peasants burdened with seigneurial obligations alike
found m orally outrageous what their ancestors found tolerable. I have shown
in this chapter how significant som e sense o f public service was in the
French countryside. Feasant com m unities who hoped that the lords might
still be held to perform such services w ere inclined to demand them rather
than sim ply abolish seigneurial claim s; for the m ost part, how ever, as
Tocqueville argued, it was to the state that peasants looked and, therefore,
while the lord’s claim s w ere to be elim inated, the state’s w ere to be made
fairer. Renauldon’s Dictionary ofFiefs and Seigneurial Rights, w hose second
edition appeared in 1788 with the crisis already under way, reveals both the
claim s o f service on which the seigneurial rights w ere held to rest as w ell as
the lim ited degree to which such service w as in actuality a vital com ponent
o f the w orld o f the lords on the eve o f the Revolution. In his very definition
o f “ seigneur,” Renauldon presents an im pressive picture o f the lord’s duties:
“ to see that crim es are punished, to protect their vassals and subjects, to
maintain peace am ong them to the extent possible, to see that official
regulations are observed, to supervise proper functioning o f churches,
hospitals, p oor relief, food for foundlings, to prevent ¡injustice by their
officials and injuries by their various agents.” 190
The lords, he goes on, are not only obligated to see ju stice done on their
lands, but “ they are even m ore strongly to do no injustice them selves”
(2:3 93). W hen he is considering certain specific rights, Renauldon stresses
the corresponding obligation. O f the right o f lords to collect a fee in return
for providing a ferry-service at river-crossings (droit de bac) he sternly
com m ents that this right never exists “ without im posing responsibilities on
the lord .” The lord m ust keep the boat in good repair, keep the docking
facilities safe, maintain the stretch o f road leading up to the crossing and
have an adequate num ber o f properly trained crew m en (he spells out details
o f the requisite training and experience) w ho m ust operate the service
throughout the day (but are forbidden to operate at night to avoid giving
passage to lawbreakers going about their business). He even insists on the
satisfaction o f impatient com m uters: during busy seasons, services m ust be
adequate and prices cannot be raised.1 199
8
9
W hen it com es to preview ing his treatise by way o f enticing prospective
purchasers, how ever, Renauldon’s preface stresses the thoroughness o f its
coverage: as the eighth o f a list o f topics to be covered, for exam ple, w e
learn that: “ Finally, w e instruct the lords concerning the rights they have in
village com m unity properties, over communal assem blies. . . the naming o f
municipal officers, the access to the accounts o f the local church, the
198. Renauldon, Dictionnaire desfiefs, 2:393.

199. Ibid., 1:94-95. See also his discussion of the monopoly on baking, 1:475-76.
appointm ent and rem oval o f judicial officials, e t c ” (1 :5 ). The point o f the
manual is to tell the lords what their peasants ow e them , a subject on which
"this volum e will be highly inform ative.” If the lords, how ever, "are curious”
to learn som ething o f their ow n duties, they are referred to another author’s
work, one that appeared 120 years previously (2:393). What up-to-date
lords really need is to know what they can claim . Acknowledging critics o f
the seigneurial regim e in his earlier treatise o f 1765, Renauldon d oes not
even attem pt to justify seigneurial rights as paym ents for present services.
He falls back on the claim that they are com pensations for the relaxation o f
an:
Conclusions
While recognizing the variety o f view points, the dominant rural sentim ent
em erges. For the seigneurial rights and the ecclesiastical paym ents, abolition
is the m ost likely response, although som e would urge indem nification for
the form er. For taxes, it is reform and replacem ent that are favored.
Residents o f rural France can also make distinctions. Am ong seigneurial
rights and ecclesiastical paym ents, those that are tied to a service to the
rural com munity are held, at least by a significant m inority, to be reform able.
Am ong taxes, those m ost closely linking the state and the citizen are the
targets o f reform proposals grounded in a vision o f a m ore egalitarian future;
taxes linked to private interm ediaries are open to the attacks that fall on
paym ents to the lord and church and, are, like them , candidates for abolition.
D oes this pattern not suggest a certain acceptance, how ever resignedly, to
the existence o f the state? Richard Pipes, com m enting on the outlook o f the
countryside as another revolution approached, asserts that Russian peasants
w ere anarchists in their hearts.2 201 Our evidence from France suggests
0
som ething rather different. W hile the heavy hand o f the royal tax-collector
drew m ore com m ent in the countryside in the late eighteenth century, it is
the exactions o f lord and church that w ere hopelessly illegitim ate.
The antipathy o f the French toward their taxes is much celebrated. James
R iley takes this aversion to be the bedrock upon which all the apparent
quirks o f the Old Regim e’s finances hinge: “ The French loathed their tax
200. Thus Renauldon could protest in 1765 against the critics: "I hear it said every day that the
seigneurial rights are odious. For my part, I say that this is the language of prejudice and
ignorance—even ingratitude. Whoever pays a seigneurial due thinks it a needless and whimsical
charge that has been imposed upon him. If, however, he goes to the origin of things, he will see
that this seigneurial due that seems so odious is only alight indicationof agreat liberality” (ThnU, ü).
201. Richard Pipes, Russia Under the OldRegime (New York: Scribner, 1974), 162.
system in the first place with a great prim eval loathing.”202 G abriel Aidant’s
m agisterial study looks beyond France as it dram atically begins with the
observation: “ O f all institutions, taxation has the distinction o f having always
been and o f continuing to be the m ost d etested .”203 The cahiers do reveal
taxation as the issue occupying the m ost attention o f the people o f the
French countryside, but they also reveal that an attem pt at achieving a new
structure o f taxation that would epjoy at least the grudging toleration o f
substantial sectors o f rural opinion would be an easier project than would
any effort at reorganizing the paym ents to church and lord.
Our data also suggest som e o f the com plexity o f the continuing discussion
o f the integration o f its rural people into the French nation. Docum enting
the continuing m ultifarious character o f this country, a recen t sociological
tour de force speaks o f “ the invention o f France.”204 Eugen W eber has
eloquently argued that w hether one explores the diversity o f peasant
cultures, the extent o f interchanges with the rest o f the country or the
existence o f a sense o f shared fate, one m ust date the period o f m ost
significant transform ation as the late nineteenth and early tw entieth centu
ries.205 In light o f such argum ents, it is the national orientation o f the
demands o f rural com m unities that is striking. Yes, they are m ore inclined
to localism than are the elites; but even so, the great m ajority o f their
dem ands, if m ore tersely expressed than in the cahiers o f the nobility and
Third Estate, are not especially local.
To be sure, as Taylor forcefully points out, the parishes do not em brace
demands concerning the constitutional order; yet the rural cahiers have their
ow n striking characteristics: an orientation to reform ing the state’s fiscal
m achinery and eliminating private revenue collectors; a m arkedly extralocal
expression for the great m ajority o f grievances; a strong sense o f equity; an
insistence on getting the public goods for which the villagers paid; an
im plicit yet thoughtful concern for public finance that is capable o f reasoned
discrim inations am ong claim s on resou rces. The liberal m ovem ent bidding
for pow er in 1789 som etim es expressed in epigram m atic fashion the insepa
rability o f taxation and citizenship. Thus the statem ent o f the Third Estate
o f N em ours: “ He is not a citizen w ho does not pay taxes” (4 P 14:173).
Thus the Revolution turns taxes from “ im positions" to “ contributions.”
Their cahiers reveal France’s rural com m unities to share som ething o f this
202. Riley, Seven Years War, 39.

203. Ardant, Théorie sociologique de (Paris: Service d'Editioo et de Vfentedes Publications
de l’Education Nationale, 1965), 1:7.
204. Hervé Le Bras and Emmanuel Ibdd, L’invention de la France: Allas anthropologique et
politique (Paris: Livre de Poche, 1961).
205. Eugen Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France, 1870-1914
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1976).
T hree R evolutionary P rogram s 143
outlook. It may be going too far to see in their grievances a sense o f

citizenship already rooted in the countryside,208 but surely it is a basis on
which a citizen’s identity could build. L et us call it proto-citizenship.
Is the relatively high degree o f national orientation— not only but particu
larly (xi taxes— the result o f slow change, the heritage o f defeat in the
seventeenth century, or the circum stances o f the m om ent? A s to this latter
possibility, consider the degree to which som e 40,000 com m unities around
France w ere m ore or less sim ultaneously m eeting and drafting their griev
ances, choosing their representatives, and experiencing them selves as part
o f a countryside in ferm en t What was achieved on a regional basis in the
great uprisings o f the seventeenth century, was perhaps for the first tim e in
French history organized on a national scale by none other than the central
governm ent itself: a broad, sustained, thoughtful peasant m ovem ent It was
not a m ovem ent w hose local units w ere structured into a translocal hierarchy
with national spokesm en at the apex, but if initiative and vitality w ere
centered on the local com m unity, the consciousness w as m ore than paro
chial. Perhaps w e may see in the catom -drafting p rocess one o f the
weDsprings o f the extraordinary capacity for independent initiative in simulta
neous action w ithout external structures o f authority that was to character
ize the pattern o f peasant insurrection in the sum m er o f 1789 and into
the 1790s.2 207
6
0
A s w e ponder the degree to which the cahiers express long-held positions
as opposed to responses to the current situation, w e can at least say with
som e certainty that the docum ents dem onstrate a considerable capacity
for subtle and sophisticated judgm ents am ong the people o f the French
countryside. Such a capacity could be drawn on again during the great
Revolution and beyond, but not necessarily in support o f precisely the sam e
positions. The cahiers, after all, provide us with a snapshot o f claim s
asserted at one m om ent; with the rapid changes in constraints and opportu
nities, w e would not exp ect the rural view s o f M arch 1790 to be what they
w ere a year earlier. It would be an error to try to predict the form s o f rural
206. TVro other studies converge here. Régine Robin’s dose analyses of the language of the
cahiers of Semur-en-Auxois leads her to the view that there is a virtual identity between the concept
of the taxpayer and of the citizen. Approaching the issue of the social role of the peasants through a
study of a great lord, Robert Forster observes that they were “vassals” to the lords but sometimes
“citizens” to the king. See Régine Robin, La société française en 1789: Semur-en-Auxois (Paris:
Pion, 1970), 306-7, 330-33; Förster, Saulx-Tavanes, 207-8.
207. Only the Western counterrevolution seems exceptional inits tendency to develop “armies”;
that is, somewhat more hierarchical coordination across communities (and even this statement does
not apply to the counterrevolution north of the Loire whose autonomous bands recall the usual
structures of peasant action). See Maurice Hutt, Chouannerie and Counter-Revolution: Puisayt, the
Princes and the British Government m the 1790s (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1963),
3-5; Sutherland, Chouans, 282-85.
activism o f the 1790s from the cahiers alone,206 but the snapshot the cahiers
give us is an im portant starting p oin t
Eugen W eber w rites that the “ transition from traditional local politics took
place when individuals and groups shifted from indifference to participation
because they perceived that they w ere involved in the nation.”2 209 H e adds
8
0
that in regard to taxation, there w as a sense o f a governm ent but that
otherw ise politics until one hundred years after the Revolution w as largely
conceived o f in local term s. But the cahiers indicate that at least for a
m om ent in the spring o f 1789, the people o f rural France had a different sort
o f consciousness. If the w orld o f the rural com m unity was a w orld o f
burdens, it was those burdens m ost often held to be essentially local— the
paym ents to lord and church— that w ere to be abolished; the burdens that
bound the village to the state w ere to be set righ t
208. I try to demonstrate this in detail in John Markoff, “Peasant Grievances and Peasant
Insurrection; France in 1789," Journal of Modem History 62 (1990): 445-76; see also Chapters 5
and6.
209. Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen, 242.
C h apter
4
On t h e I d e o l o g ic a l
C o n s t r u c t io n of th e
S e ig n e u r ia l R e g im e
by th e T h ir d E state
( a n d o f T wo S eig n eu rial
R e g im e s by th e N o b ility )
T he meaning o f any social institution to those who support it or oppose it

m ust He in part in its transactions with other institutions. The seigneurial
rights in particular have, from the eighteenth century to the present, been
discussed in conjunction with “feudalism . ” Yet there are few term s on which
scholars so intensely insist on the necessity o f proper usage and on which
there is so Httle actual consensus as to what that proper usage might b e .1
For those w ho w ere to sit in the Revolution’s legislatures, this and related
term s w ere part o f their everyday vocabulary and, as such, constituted
im portant elem ents o f their tools for understanding the w aves o f rural
insurrection as w ell as the term s in which their actions to regenerate France
1. When the papers of the important 1968 Toulouse colloquium on “the abolition of feudalism in
the Western world” were published, this discomfort was betrayed in a cover format that featured
“féodalité” within quotation marks that don’t appear on the title page. See L'Abolition de lafiodcdití
dans Umonde occidental (Paris: Editions du Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, 1971). I
have tried to explore why this term has so successfully resisted consensual definition in John
w ere fram ed. What I propose to do here is to establish som ething o f the
conceptual map o f the seigneurial regim e in the minds o f the Third Es
tate and nobility in 1789. We cannot directly enter the heads o f the future
legislators to investigate how they saw the seigneurial rights within the
fabric o f French institutions. But w e can use the cahiers to explore what the
assem blies that adopted them understood to be the role o f those rights in
relation to their concerns about state finances, econom ic developm ent,
religious institutions. W ere the seigneurial rights seen as a group o f isolated
institutions or w ere they seen as som e sort o f unity? And to the extent that
the seigneurial rights form ed a structure, was there a w eb o f associations
that appeared to bind these institutions to other arenas o f French society?
We shall direct our attention first to the Third Estate and shall then consider
the contrast presented by the nobility. In this way w e can explore the
conceptual enm eshm ent o f the seigneurial regim e with other institutional
arenas in the language o f the assem blies that chose the delegates to what
becam e the National A ssem bly.*2
The discussion to follow will repeatedly refer to several broad aspects o f
the treatm ent o f the seigneurial rights in the cahiers. First o f all w e shall
frequently be interested in the num ber o f distinct seigneurial rights dis
cussed by a cahier; this tells us som ething o f how wide-ranging a docum ent
is in its consideration o f the seigneurial regim e. It does not tell us, how ever,
Markoff, “¿Cuál es h cuestión? Algunos comentarios sobre la transición hada el capitalismo,”

AREAS 11 (1989): 37-46.
2. While the absence of the cahiers of the dergy denies us the opportunity to develop a parallel
study of the discourse of the assemblies selecting an important group of delegates, the gravity of
this gap in our data is reduced by virtue of the relatively low participation of the deputies of the
First Estate. Although they played a mayor role in the events leading up to the merger of the three
estates as the National Assembly, they tended to be far less active than the other delegates
thereafter they participated far less than their numbers would warrant as speakers in the debates,
in the rotating positions of chair or secretary of the assembly or in the activities of the assembly's
34 committees. (See Edna Hindie Lemay, “Les révélations d’un dictionnaire: du nouveau sur la
composition de l'Assemblée Nationale Constituante (1789-1791),” Annales historiques de la Révolu
tion française, no. 284 [1992): 159-89.) Along the same lines, note that in the selection made by
François Furet and Ran Halévi of mqjor orators of the Constituent Assembly, there are eight who
had been delegates of the Third Estate, seven of the nobility and three of the dergy; see Orateurs
de la Révolutionfrançaise, voL 1, Les constituants (Paris: Gallimard, 1989). Of course we’re losing
something in not having coded the clerical cahiers: many ecclesiastics were members of corporate
bodies that enjoyed seigneurial rights; the tithe—so often coupled with seigneurial rights in the
debates of 1789—was a significant component of the income of many others; clerical delegates
were an important part of the events of August 4-11; and over the next two years one of the major
speakers of the right (Maury) and a significant voice on the left (Grégoire) were in this group; see
Timothy Tackett, Becoming a Revolutionary: The Deputies of the French NationalAssembly and the
Emergence of a Revolutionary Culture (1789-1790) (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996).
Some of the complexity of the conceptions of the seigneurial regime the deputies carried to
Versailles is missed inomitting the clerical element
Ideological C onstruction o f th e S eigneurial R egim e 147
how salient the seigneurial regim e is am ong the multitude o f institutions and
practices about which one might com plain. Som e docum ents have much to
say on seigneurial rights— and on everything else as w ell To assess the
im portance o f the seigneurial regim e com pared to other institutions, I
com puted the proportion o f a cahie/s grievances devoted to the seigneurial
rights. The distinction betw een these tw o m easures— the num ber and
the proportion o f grievances about seigneurial rights— may be seen in a
com parison o f the cahiers o f the parishes and o f the Third E state. The first
o f these m easures would show that the peasants com m only address few er
seigneurial rights than does the Third E state; but the second m easure would
show that the seigneurial rights are the subject o f a larger proportion o f
peasant grievances (see Chapter 2).
The distinction betw een these m easures is o f m ethodological as w ell as
substantive im portance. Since the cahiers differ so greatly in their length,
one som etim es w onders w hether the large num ber o f dem ands on, say, the
seigneurial regim e in a particular group o f docum ents is a facet o f a
propensity to have a large num ber o f demands on any subject w hatsoever,
or, on the contrary, is an indication o f a greater focu s (Hi the seigneurial
regim e as com pared to other institutions.3 Particularly troublesom e in this
regard is the interpretation o f the degree to which demands are associated
with (Hie another. C onsider tw o grievances in w hose relationship w e take
an in terest T hey will both tend to occu r in longer docum ents; they will both
tend not to occu r in shorter ones. TWo random ly selected grievances will,
therefore tend to be positively associated, in the sense that they are likely
to be present (or absent) in the sam e docum ents.
It is the first o f our m easures that is the m ore problem atic for those
cahiers having any particular grievance (for exam ple, demands about church
revenues) will also tend to discuss a relatively large num ber o f seigneurial
rights. We shall have tw o m eans o f evading this difficulty. First o f all w e
shall avoid focusing our attention on the size o f the relationship betw een
discussions o f an institution and the num ber o f seigneurial rights m entioned
in the cahiers in isolation. We shall look instead for the pattern o f such
associations. Second, w e shall also be exploring the relationship betw een
discussion o f an institution and the proportion o f all grievances that concern
the seigneurial system . This second m easure, o f the salience o f the seigneur
ial regim e, is not subject to the sam e problem s as the first, the extensiveness
o f the discussion.
3. Since the variability of the number of demands i» not merely a methodological nuisance but
abo a critical variable in its own right, a simple statistical eliminationof the effect of size might weO
be a cure that is worse than the disease.
The Unity of the Seigneurial Regime

The very first m atter to be addressed is w hether or not the various
seigneurial rights have a coherence for those w ho have adopted the cahiers
in the spring o f 1789. L et us first ask w hether there is som e explicitly
conceptualized totality em bodied in such phrases as “ the feudal ami sei
gneurial rights,” “ the feudal regim e,” and the like. Nearly half o f those
Third Estate cahiers that treat the seigneurial regim e (which itself is alm ost
all o f them ) have som e such notion. The corresponding figures for parishes
and nobles respectively are 24% and 26% (and only about three-fourths o f
each o f these groups take up seigneurial rights at all; see Tables 2 .3 and 2 .4 ).
Such explicit conceptualization is an im portant step toward the revolution
ary definition o f “ the feudal regim e” that has been abolished and w hose
abolition in turn defines the revolution. But there is an im plicit conceptualiza
tion to look for as w ell. D oes discussion o f one seigneurial right suggest
discussing others? Table 4.1 show s the tendency for Third Estate docu
m ents that take up virtually any seigneurial right to discuss others as w ell
The table considers tw o classes o f docum ents: those that do not and those
that do discuss the right in question. For each class o f docum ents, the table
displays the mean num ber o f other seigneurial rights treated within each
class.4 C onsider the right to raise pigeons, as an exam ple. T h ose docum ents
that discuss this right discuss, on the average, 8 .7 other rights as w ell,
while those that do not take up the lord’s avian am usem ents consider, on
the average, 5 .6. Examining Table 4.1 as a w hole, w e can see that the
discussion o f any seigneurial right is associated with the discussion o f others,
alm ost always at a high level o f statistical significance.5 Yet Table 4.1 is not
fully persuasive since, as pointed out above, cahiers that have any particular
grievance will tend to have many others. We need to ask, additionally,
w hether a Third Estate assem bly that discusses a particular right also has a
togfaer proportion o f its demands focused on other seigneurial rights. Table
4 .2 presents the appropriate data. To pursue the previous exam ple, in
docum ents taking up the right to raise pigeons, 7.3% o f dem ands concern
other seigneurial rights, 2.1% m ore than in cahiers that do not m ention
pigeon-raising. The overall conclusion is that there is a very strong im plicit
unity to the seigneurial regim e in the Third Estate cahiers. D ocum ents that
discuss one right discuss others as w ell
4. The tables are limited to those rights mentioned with sufficient frequency to have figured in
our previous discussions. See Table 3.4.
5. The level of statistical significance is presented only in order to give some sense of whether
these differences are of a size comparable to those sociologists conventionally think worthy of
discussion. Since the sample of Third Estate cahiers consists of the quasi-totality of surviving
cahiers, itself a large but not a probabilistic sample of aOthat were produced, there is no process of
statistical inference involved.
D ible 4 .1 . Other Seigneurial Rights Discussed by Third Estate Cahiers that D o or Do

Not Discuss a Particular Right (mean number)
Cahier Does Not Cahier Does

Discuss Particular Discuss Particular
Seigneurial Right Right Right Difference
Periodic dues
Cens 7.0 9.8 2.8***
Champart 6.3 9.4 3.2***
Cens et rentes 6.9 9.6 2.8***
Periodic dues in general 7.2 8.8 1.6*
Miscellaneous periodic dues 7.2 9.5 2.3**
Monopoly on ovens 6.4 10.1 3.7***
Monopoly on milling 6.2 9.1 2.9***
Monopoly on winepress 6.6 10.0 3.4***
Monopolies in general 6.6 7.5 0.9
Seigneurial toils 6.1 7.6 1.5**
Dues on fairs and markets 6.9 9.0 2.2***
Dues on property transfers
(lods et ventes) 6.6 9.4 2.7***
Retrait 6.8 9.0 2.2**
Justice
Seigneurial courts in general 6.1 8.3 2.2***
Seigneurial courts.
miscellaneous 6.6 9.1 2.5***
Hunting rights 5.3 8.5 a 2***
Right to raise pigeons 5.6 &7 3.1***
Right to raise rabbits 6.8 9.8 3.0***
Fishing rights ■ 7.0 10.9 3.9***
Symbolic Deference Patterns
Right to bear arms 7.0 8.7 1.7*
Serfdom
Mainmorte 6.8 9.9 3.1***
Serfdom in general 7.1 9.8 2.7**
Other
Compulsory labor services 5.4 8.4 3.0***
Miscellaneous right 5.8 9.2 3.3***
Regime in general 6.0 8.5 2.5***
*P < .05 (1-tailed t-test).

**p < .01 (1-tailed t-test).
•**p < .001 (1-taOed t-test).
Ifcble 4 .2 . Demands Deating with Other Seigneurial Rights in Third Estate Cahiers
that Do or Do Not Discuss a Particular Right (mean % )
Cahier Does Not Cahier Does

Discuss Particular Discuss Particular
Right Right Right Difference
Periodic dues
Cens 6.2% 7.8% 1.6% **
Champart 5.7 7.9 2.2***
Cens et rentes 6.0 8.4 2.4***
Periodic dues in general 6.4 6.7 0.3
Miscellaneous periodic dues 6.3 8.2 1.9**
Monopoly on ovens 5.7 8.4 2.7***
Monopoly on milling 5.7 7.5 1.8***
Monopoly on winepress 6.0 8.1 2.1***
Monopolies in general 5.7 6.7 1.0*
Seigneurial tolls 5.8 6.4 0.6
Dues on fairs and markets 6.2 7.2 1.0*
(lods et ventes) 6.0 7.8 1.8***
Retrait 6.1 7.2 1.1*
Justice
Seigneurial courts in general 5.7 6.8 1.1*
Seigneurial courts,
miscellaneous 5.9 7.6 1.8***
Hunting rights 5.4 6.7 1.3**
Right to raise pigeons 5.2 7.3 2.1***
Right to raise rabbits 6.2 7.5 1.2*
Fishing rights 6.2 8.5 2.2*
Right to bear arms 6.3 6.9 0.6
Serfdom
Mainmorte 6.1 7.9 1.8**
Serfdom in general 6.2 8.5 2.3***
Other
Compulsory labor services 4.8 7.4 2.6***
Miscellaneous right 5.6 7.2 1.6***
Regime in general 5.2 7.3 2.1***
*p < .05 (l-ta3ed t-test).

***p < .001 (1-tailed t-test).
Ideological C onstruction o f the S eigneurial R egim e 151
Is it also the case that those which make specific proposals about (m e o f
these rights also tend to make the same proposals about many o f them ?
Table 4 .3 presents such an analysis. Pursuing our pigeon-raising exam ple,
are those cahiers that demand its abolition without com pensation m ore likely
to p ose similar demands o f the other rights discussed than do those
cahiers that, while taking up pigeon-raising, fail to demand abolition without
com pensation? (F or this analysis to be based on stable num bers w e included
only those rights for which at least 15 docum ents did and 15 did not make
such a dem and.) The results are clear, for m ost seigneurial rights there is
a m arked tendency for those assem blies that wanted abolition without
com pensation to desire the sam e for other rights as w ell A similar study o f
demands for indem nification (which I shall not present h ere), m oreover,
show s the sam e pattern. Thus there is not only a global propensity to
discuss seigneurial rights but to view them as calling for the sam e general
sort o f treatm ent as one another. And this propensity coexists with a
capacity to differentiate am ong seigneurial rights that w e have extensively
discussed in the previous chapters.
If the seigneurial rights have a structure for the authors o f the Third
Estate cahiers, it is a loose structure. The num ber oí distinct rights
m entioned in the cahiers o f the Third Estate ranges from a low o f 0 to a high
o f 18; the presence o f a particular right is typically associated w ith the
discussion o f an additional tw o or three others as welL This is a strong
association, but it also leaves a considerable distinctiveness in the discussion
o f particular rights. T here is no single right so strongly tied to the others
that it carries them all along with it Similarly, if Table 4 .3 show ed a clear
tendency for abolition to be a demand that is generalized across the
seigneurial regim e, it also show s that different rights are hardly thought o f
indistinctly. It is far from the case that docum ents either propose to abolish
aO rights they discuss or to abolish none.
Even such a loose unity, how ever, stands in contrast to the cahiers o f the
nobility. The form at o f Table 4 .4 differs from Tables 4.1 to 4 .3 in that w e
will w ily present the relevant differences, that is to say, the analogues to
colum n 3 in those earlier tables. This and subsequent tables using this form at
always indicate how much greater are the mean num ber and percentage o f
demands on seigneurial subjects for cahiers with specified grievances over
cahiers without those grievances. Looking at the entries in Table 4 .4 , for
exam ple, w e see that those noble cahiers which discuss the cens, take up,
on the average, 3 .8 m ore distinct seigneurial rights than those that do not
and that 2.7% m ore o f all their grievances deal with the seigneurial regim e.
We g o through the details here because many subsequent tables in this
chapter are to be read in the sam e fashion. T im ing to the substance o f
Table 4 .4 show s that about half the seigneurial rights are not, for the nobles,
associated with discussions o f other rights. The unity seen im plicitly by the
Ik b le 4 .3 . Among Third Estate Cakiers Discussing a Particular Seigneurial Right,

Demands for the Abolition Without Compensation o f Other Seigneurial Rights, for
Cakiers That D o or D o Not Call for the Abolition o f the Right in Question (mean %)
Cahier Not Cahier

Demanding Demanding
Seigneurial Right Abolition Abolition Difference
Monopoly on ovens 26% 55% 29% ***
Monopoly on milling 31 56 25***
Monopoly on winepress 20 54 35***
Monopolies in general 25 45 20***
Seigneurial tolls 29 40 11*
Dues on fairs and markets 24 48 25**
Dues on property transfers (iods
et ventes) 35 51 16**
Retrait 33 34 1
Justice
Seigneurial courts in general 32 35 4
Hunting rights 37 50 13*
Right to raise pigeons 32 43 12*
Right to raise rabbits 19 42 22**
Serfdom
Mainmorte 32 36 4
Other
Compulsory labor services 25 45 20***
Miscellaneous right 36 52 15**
Regime in general 34 48 14*
*P < .05 (1-tailed t-test).

***p < .001 (1-taOed t-test).
Note: excluded from this table are computations in which there were not at least 15 cakiers
HgmanHing ahnKtinn and IS not demanding xhni tiniL
Third E state, therefore, is not to be taken for granted. We shall return to

the nobility later in this chapter after a closer examination o f the place o f
seigneurial rights in the cahiers o f the Third Estate.
Ih b le 4 .4 . Differences in Numbers o f Distinct Seigneurial Rights Associated with

Particular Rights in Noble Cahiers
Grievances Concerning
Number o f Distinct Seigneurial Regime as
Seigneurial Rights a Percentage o f All
Seigneurial Right Discussed Demands
Periodic dues
Cens 3.8* 2.7%
Champart 3.1 2.9*
Periodic dues in general 3.7* 3.0
Monopolies in general 1.8** 2.1**
Seigneurial tolls 0.9* 1.1*
Dues on fairs and markets 2.6 4.0*
(ïods et ventes) 2.9 2.2
Justice
Seigneurial courts in general 1.7*** 1.2**
Seigneurial courts,
miscellaneous 1.0* 1.9**
Hunting rights 1.8** 1.7**
Right to raise pigeons 3.2*** 3.1**
Right to bear arms 1.4** 0.8
Honorific rights 0.1 - 0 .3
Fealty and homage {foi et
hommage) 1.9** 1.1
Avowal and enumeration (aveu
et dénombrement) 2.4* 1.6
Symbolic deference patterns in
general 0.3 0.3
Serfdom
Mainmorte 2.8 3.9
Serfdom in general 1.8 1.9
Other
Compulsory labor services 4.0*** 3.5**
Miscellaneous right 1.2* 1.8*
Regime in general 1.6** 1.5**
*p< .05 (1-tailed t-te*t).

***p < .001 (1-tailed t-test).
The Seigneurial Regime as a

Financial Burden
In Chapter 2 w e saw how much o f the w orld seen through the parish cahiers
was a w orld o f burdens. In this section, w e shall explore the extent to which
the urban notables saw the seigneurial regim e as a burden am ong others. In
what w ays was the seigneurial regim e seen as separate and distinct? Did
the cahiers join lord, church, and state as partners (or rivals) in the
extraction o f resou rces from the French people?
Church Exactions
Table 4 .5 show s the degree to which discussion o f the principal church
exactions are associated with the seigneurial regim e. This table and many
o f those that follow , will display the ways that cahiers that do or do not have
som e specified characteristic differ in their discussions o f seigneurial rights.
In Table 4 .5 , for exam ple, w e are concerned with the degree to which the
seigneurial regim e is treated differently in cahiers which do or do not discuss
the tithe (or the casuels). A s for the substance o f Table 4 .5, it is clear that
both those cahiers with grievances concerning the tithe and those that
discuss the m ore detested casuelsfi are also m ore concerned than other
docum ents about the seigneurial regim e.
L et us consider w hether the association o f church and seigneur is lim ited
to an association o f their burdens, or w hether those docum ents that deal
with seigneurial rights are also particularly prone to deal with ecclesiastical
m atters m ore generally. We shall first o f all inquire w hether or not discus-
Thble 4 .5 . Differences in Discussions o f Seigneurial Regime Associated with

Discussions erf Church’s Financial Exactions in Third Estate Cahiers
Grievances Concerning Seigneurial

Number o f Distinct Regime as a Percentage
Seigneurial Rights Discussed o f All Demands
Tithe 2.4*** 1.4% **

Casuels 1.9*** 1.2*
*p < .05 (1-tailed t-test).

•**p < .001 (1-tailed t-test).
Note: The quantities shown are differences; they are the quantities by which those cahiers that
take up the tithe (or the casuels) exceed the cahiers that do not in their discussions of the
seigneurial regime.6
6. On tithes and casuels see Chapter 3, p. 109.

sions o f the seigneurial regim e are m ore extensive and m ore salient in those
cahiers that are m ost opposed to the religious institutions and practices o f
France other than the tithe and the casuels. We shall then ask if such
discussions are m ore extensive and m ore salient in those cahiers giving
m ost attention to religious m atters, w hether opposed or n o t In Table 4 .6
w e explore antagonistic discussion o f religious institutions (including am ong
other topics the organization o f the Catholic Church, church-state and
church-Rom e relations, the role o f m onastic orders, and the parish clergy).
One sees that the m ore frequently a cahier demands the abolition o f som e
feature o f the church, the m ore extensive is its discussion o f the seigneurial
regim e. It is striking that one finds this even without taking the tithe and
casuels into account
Table 4 .7 show s, even m ore rem arkably, that it is not only hostile
referen ces to religion that are im plicitly linked to the seigneurial regim e.
The greater the proportion o f all demands discussing religion— as before,
excluding the tithes and the casuels— the m ore attention is given to the
seigneurial rights as w ell. W hy? A t the local level the local seigneur was
often honored by the local church as head o f the com m unity. W hatever the
actual nature o f political leadership— and this varied a great deal— the lord
was often granted great public resp ect in local religious practice. W riting on
Brittany, Sutherland observes:
Any “haut et puissant seigneur” w ho was also “ fondateur de la

paroisse” had an im pressive array o f [honorific] rights. He had his
arm orial bearings over the church door, a reserved fam ily pew , the
right to be first to receive bread at M ass, to be buried in the church,
to have a seat on the parish council, and to have public prayers said
for the family’s w elfare. It is significant, too, that m ost o f these
rights w ere connected with the Church because it was through the
Ih b le 4 .6 . Attention to Seigneurial Regime and Hostility to Religious Institutions or

Practices (Other than the Tithe and Casuels) in Third Estate Cahiers
Numbers of
Demands that Mean Grievances
a Religious Number of Concerning
Institution or Seigneurial Seigneurial Regime Number
Practice be Rights as a Percentage of of
Abolished* Discussed All Grievances Cahiers
0 4.7 5.0% 48
1 5.7 6.1 31
2 7.3 6.9 37
3 8.8 6.9 26
4 or more 10.4 7.8 56
•ABdemands concerning religious matters other than the tithe and the casuels are included here
Ifeble 4 .7 . Attention to Seigneurial Regime and Salience o f Religious Institutions or

Practices (Other than the Tithe and Casuels) in Third Estate Cahiers
Grievances
Concerning
Percentage o f Seigneurial
All Demands Mean Number o f Regime as a
Devoted to Seigneurial Percentage o f
Religion* Rights Discussed All Grievances
0 -3 .7 % 4.2 3.6%
3.8 -6 .1 % 6.7 6.3
6.2-9.9% 8.0 7.0
10% or greater 8.5 7.1
*Afl demands concerning religious matters other than the tithe andcasuels are induded here
. Church that the rural com munity defined itself in the scattered
pattern o f the B reton countryside.7
W hile this im m ersion o f the lord in religious im agery at the parish level
may have had a special potency in Brittany, it was hardly lim ited to that
province. A Burgundian seigneurie is characterized by its historian as
enveloped in religion.8 Renauldon's discussion o f honorific rights is rem ark
ably revealing in this regard. The com pleteness o f his coverage o f these
m atters is one o f his great points o f pride and the list is fascinating. A s
pointed out earlier (see Chapter 2, p. 47n), alm ost every practice m entioned
under the head “ droits honorifiques" is religious in nature. Indeed, Renaul-
don tells us that strictly speaking, honorific rights mean “ the honors that
lords receive in the churches."9 The honor o f the lord, then, w as to a large
extent supported by church practice. T hese sym bolic trappings established
a relationship o f lord and church and may have linked hostility to the one
with hostility to the other. This lord-church nexus w as largely unchallenged
in the cahiers,10but it becam e a focu s o f peasant action as the Revolution
continued to redefine the seigneurial regim e. The church benches o f many
lords w ere ripped out and burned (see Chapter 5, p. 222).
7. Sutherland, The Chouans: The Social Origins of Papular Counter-Revolution m Upper

Brittany, 1770-1796 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982), 182.
8. DontenwiD, Une seigneurie sous VAncien Régime: L' “Etoile" en Brionnats, du XVIe au
XVIlIe siècles (1575-1778) (Roanne: Editions Horvath, 1973), 109.
9. Joseph Renauldon, Dictionnaire desfiefs et des droits seigneuriaux utiles et honorifiq%tes (Paris:
Delalain, 1788), l:i, 346. 355.
10. Religious honors for the lords might be carried a bit too far. The peasants of Mootastruc-la-
conseiUère (in Toulouse) protested the practice of painting a black band on the local church at the
lord's death. A black piece of doth, easily removable, would do nicely. See Félix Pasquier and
François Galabert, Cahiers paroissiaux des sénéchausées de Tbulouse et de Commmges en 1789
(Toulouse: Privat, 1925-28), 53.
Ideological C onstruction o p the S eigneurial R egim e 157
Taxation
Table 4 .8 show s that far from being linked to the seigneurial regim e, taxation
seem s, if anything, antithetical The m ore attention a docum ent gives to
taxation, the less does it take up the seigneurial rights. An analysis o f
hostility to taxation— as m easured by the proportion o f demands concerning
taxation that call for the abolition o f an existing tax or an aspect o f the tax
system —also fails to show a positive association. Taxation, then, unlike
church exactions, is the pet topic (or the favorite target) o f different cahiers
than those that focus on the seigneurial system .
If ecclesiastical burdens w ere and state burdens w ere not so closely
associated with the seigneurial regim e, was this not in part due to an
institutional structure in which church and seigneurial exactions w ere som e
tim es easy to confound? The tithe’s acknow ledged purpose was for support
o f the person and activities o f the parish p riest Yet ecclesiastical corpora
tions (m onasteries, say) w ere often notorious possessors o f the tithe.
Though form ally responsible for the support o f the pastoral w ork o f the
parish clergy, such tithe-holders w ere hardly noted for their devotion to
parish affairs.11 The Third Estate o f Castelm oron d’A lbret, for exam ple,
reports the com plaints o f several parishes. One com plains o f an absent tithe-
holder w ho neither resides locally nor supports a vicaire; another has a
priest w ho only com es by for one religious service a year (A P 2:548); M ehin
wants a proper balance o f clerical exactions and duties (A P 3:746) and
M ontreuil-sur-M er wants tithe-holders to take responsibility for church
upkeep and schoolm asters’ w ages (A P 4:71). T h ese tithe-holding corpora
tions w ere often seigneurs as w ell, devoted to collecting a broad range o f
seigneurial rights. Clerical corporations w ere but the m ost evident target o f
grievance for such practices; any ecclesiastic other than the priest m ight, if
Ih b le 4 .8 . Attention to Seigneurial Regime and Salience o f Tax Matters in

Third Estate Cahiers
Percentage o f All Mean Number o f Seigneurial Regime as Number o f
Demands Devoted Seigneurial a Percentage o f All Third Estate
to Taxation Rights Discussed Grievances Cahiers
0-11.4% 8.3 6.9% 49

11.5-14.0% 8.8 7.0 52
14.1-17.9% 7.3 6.7 48
18.0% or more 5.8 5.5 49
11. When the tithe-holder was not the parish priest, the priest was supported by the portion
congrue, a frequently though not invariably «mal salary. Payment of the portion congrue was the
responsibility of the tithe-holder, as were such pariahional obligations as physical repair of the
church; see Chapter 3.
tithe-holder, provoke such issues; and ecclesiastical persons as w ell as

corporations might hold seigneurial rights. It was hardly obvious, when
peasants attacked their clerical lords in 1789, w hether it was as seigneurs
or as tithe-holders that they w ere op p osed .12
T here w ere lay tithe-holders as w ell, since the tithe, in the cou rse o f
the centuries, might have passed into anyone’s hands. The revolutionary
legislators had to deal with the dime inféodée as such lay tithes w ere known,
and in their rem arkable confidence in the pow er o f w ords to distinguish what
was and what was not feudalism , they managed to outdo them selves in
confusion.13 If a m onastery could collect champart, often known as the
seigneurial tith e,14 as well as the clerical tithe from which it was not readily
distinguishable, while a lay seigneur could collect the dime inféodée, any
attem pt at clarity was a guarantee o f obscurity. The line betw een ecclesiasti
cal and seigneurial exactions, then, could be hard to draw .15 And beyond the
confusion o f exactions there was the w hole church-lord nexus.
A re there perhaps specific taxes that might be less distant from the
seigneurial regim e? Table 4 .9 show s that when the Third E state discusses
alm ost any particular tax, it also is prone to discuss m ore seigneurial rights.
On the other hand, the stronger test o f w hether a greater proportion o f
demands concern those rights is only satisfied by four specific taxes.
Evidently, discussion o f specific taxes is often a sign o f m ore verbose texts
that contain m ore o f just about everything. A t the risk o f throwing babies
out with bathwater, w e shall only consider closely those taxes that survive
the m ore stringent test o f salience.
The droit de franc-fief was a substantial paym ent every tw enty years by
com m oners in possession o f so-called noble land. The no longer plausible
rationale for this paym ent was that it com pensated the king for the loss o f
military resou rces when noble land passed out o f the hands o f the w arrior
class. This tax quite clearly derives from a feudal im age o f society, which
may account for A lfred Cobban thinking o f it as alm ost a seigneurial rig h t16
Table 4 .9 show s that the Third Estate in 1789 is with Cobban, quite strongly
12. For some examples in 1789, see Lefebvre’s survey of the insurrections in Alsace, Franche-
Comté and Méconnais in La Grande Peur de 1789 (Paris: Armand Cohn, 1970), 125-26, 131,
136-37.
13. P. HerShy, “L’abolition de la dime inféodée (1789-1793),” in Soboul, ed., Contributions à
Tkistoirtpaysanne de la Révolutionfrançaise (Paris: Editions Sociales, 1977), 377-99.
14. The Nobüity of Soule speak of their "tithes” without adjectival qualification (AP 5:779).
15. After 1789 peasants might exploit this confusion by claimingthat the revolutionary legislation
on the tithe gave them the right not to pay what we—but not they—would call champart For a good
example, see Robert Forster, The House of Saulx-Tavanes: Versailles and Burgundy, 1700-1830
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1971), 149-54.
16. Alfred Cobban, The Social Interpretation of the French Revotution (Cambridge: Cambridge
Ik b le 4 .9 . Differences in Discussions o f Seigneurial Regime Associated with Specific

Taxes in Third Estate Cahiers
Number of Grievances Concerning

Distinct Seigneurial Regime as
Seigneurial Rights a Percentage o f AH
Tax Discussed Demands
Capitation 2.0** 0.2%

Vingtième 1.5* 0.5
Tbtlle 1.6** 0.3
Franc-fief 2.8*** 1.5**
Droit de contrôle 1.7** 0.5
Droit ¿insinuation 0.8 - 0 .2
Droit de centième denier 2.0*** 0.9*
Gabelle 0.7 0.2
Aides 2.1*** 1.2**
Taxes cm manufactured goods 1.1* - 0 .3
Octrois 1.2* - 0 .4
Droits ¿entrée et de sortie 0.5 0.0
Royal corvée. 2.3*** 1.2*
Trades 1.6* 0.4
*p< .05 (1 tailed t-test).

**P < .01 (1 tailed t-test).
****<.001 (1 tailed t-test).
so, in fact, in the sense that it is the tax m ost strongly associated with the
The droit de centième denier was a tax on the registration o f property
transfers. This one-percent tax applied not m erely to the ow nership o f land
but to the ow nership o f seigneurial rights as welL The very similar droit
¿[insinuation applied to the registration o f transfers o f ow nership o f incom e
bearing resou rces other than real property and seigneurial rights (govern
m ent annuities, say). It is, by contrast, not associated with the seigneurial
regim e at alL17 The m ost general registry tax, the droit de contrôle, levied
<xi all legal docum ents, including those paying insinuation or centième denier
as w ell, is also not associated with an increased proportion o f dem ands on
the seigneurial regim e. O f the three registry taxes, then, it is the one
institutionally linked to seigneurial rights that is associated with those rights
in the cahiers.
If the droit defranc-fiefand the droit de centième denierw ere institutionally
intertwined with the seigneurial regim e, the sam e cannot be said o f either
the royal corvée or the aides. The governm ent’s exactions o f com pulsory
17. An unusualy dear explanation of the various andextremely murkyregistration taxes is found
in George T. Matthews, The Royal General Farms of Eighteenth-Century France (New York;
Columbia University Press, 1958), 176-79.
labor services for the construction and maintenance o f roads and bridges,
levied upon peasants w hose m isfortune it was to reside near those roads
and bridges, was if anything, an encroachm ent on the lord’s capacity to claim
similar services. But the direct constraint o f human labor stood out from all
the many other royal taxes; did it not appear to be ju st the sort o f thing the
lords did in the barbaric past, reducing “the king’s subjects to the condition
o f serfs,’’ as Lavoisier com m ented in the course o f the debates o f the late
1780s on reform ?18 The central governm ent, in fact, seem ed on occasion to
have regarded the tw o corvées as d o se kin:19 the royal demand for labor
built (Hi the seigneurial one. W hen O rry as controller-general decided on an
elaborate road-building program , the governm ent attem pted to get the
seigneurs to extract the labor from their peasants; when this approach
failed, the royal corvée was substituted.20
The aides w ere an exceedingly com plex group o f taxes levied (Hi alcoholic
beverages. I am not certain why they seem m ore associated with the
seigneurial regim e than many other taxes. Perhaps it was because the
structure o f privilege largely exem pted the first tw o esta tes.21 E cclesiastical
and noble seigneurs, w hose vineyards produced less heavily taxed wine,
had thereby a com petitive edge over their peasants in the m arketplace, an
edge som etim es augm ented by the lord’s right to control the date o f
harvesting o f the grapes (ban de vendange) or the right to get his wine to
m arket first (banvin). But direct institutional linkages are certainly not the
heart o f this association. Although all o f the handful o f cahiers that discuss
the ban de vendange also take up the aides, there is absolutely no relationship
with the banvin (and only a feeble one with the m onopoly on the w inepress).
18. Henri Pigeonneau et Alfred de Fbvile, L’Administration de Fagriculture au contrôle des

finances (1785-1787): Procès-verbaux et rapports (Paris: Gufflaumin, 1882), 409. The Third Estate
ai Agen objects to the coraie that those in the Third Estate are no longer the slaves of the first two
orders (AP 1:688).
19. Cahiers sometimes treat the two corvées together as in the common disgust expressed by
the Third Estate of Rustaing (AP 2:368).
20. Douglas Dakin, Turgot and the Ancien Régime m France (New York: Octagon Books, 1965),
63. An alternative hypothesis: The commonality of royal corvée and seigneurial rights lies in the
damage to agriculture, a point stressed in physkxntic writings on the corvée’s nefarious removal of
control over their own labor power from those subject to it; see Georges Weulersse, Le Mouvement
pkfsiocrafique en France de 1756 à 1770 (Paris: Félix Alcan, 1910), 1:442—47. The Third Estate of
Angers, for example, joins together as “terrible hindrances” thegabelle, the corvées, and seigneurial
rights (AP 2:43).
21. A straw in the wind: The adder of Lay-St-Christophe in the bailliage of Nancy inserts a
grievance about the aides into the midst of several dealing with seigneurial rights. The complete
suppression of these taxes is demanded because they fall only on commoners. This parish opposes
the aides, we are told, "in the same way” as the seigneurial monopolies and desires their abolition
"equally”: see Jean Godfrin, Cahiers de doléances des bailliages des généralités de Metz et de Nancy
pour les états généraux de 1789, voL 4, Cahiers du bailliage de Nancy (Paris: Librairie Ernest
Leroux, 1934), 4:230.
The relationship o f this tax and the seigneurial regim e, in short, w hatever it
may be, is not a spillover o f the special concerns o f w ine-producers.
To parallel our earlier shift in focus from grievances about church burdens
to grievances about religious m atters w e raise the question here o f hostility
to the central governm ent Consider the proportion o f all grievances con
cerning the central governm ent apart from taxation, that demand the
abolition o f som e institution or practice. E very Third Estate cahier, without
exception, discusses som e aspects o f governm ent The proportion o f such
discussions that urge abolition o f the specific institution or practice in
question ranges from an apparently satisfied zero to a certainly angry tw o-
fifths. Table 4 .1 0 show s a clear relationship: attention to the seigneurial
regim e is sharply low er in docum ents with minimal hostility to the central
governm ent22 Am ong the urban elites, anger at the central governm ent and
concern about the seigneurial regim e w ent hand in hand.
The seigneurial rights proper, then, are seen as closely related to the
church exactions and to som e though far from all taxes; grievances about the
seigneurial regim e are, m oreover, m ore w ide-ranging and m ore prom inent in
cahiers hostile to the conduct o f religious affairs and in cahiers above a low
threshold o f hostility to the central governm ent The association with church
burdens might be in part a m atter o f the blurriness o f institutional outlines
in which ecclesiastical lords collect cens et rentes and lay ones the dime
inféodée; and the link to the droit defranc-fiefand the droit de centième denier
may be one o f institutional interconnectedness. But with the aides and the
royal corvées w e are dealing with an association o f a different order; this is
even clearer with regard to the broader grievances about church and state
from which tithes and taxes w ere excluded.
If institutional confusion or institutional connection w ere all that m attered
Ih b le 4 .1 0 . Grievances About Seigneurial Regime and Hostility to Central Government

in Third Estate Cahiers
Percentage o f demands Grievances Concerning

for abolition among Number o f Distinct Seigneurial Regime as
demands concerning Seigneurial Rights a Percentage o f AD
central government1 Discussed Demands
0.0% 4.3 4.6%

0.1-3.9% 6.8 4.7
4.0-7.3% 8.7 7.2
7.4-10.7% 8.1 7.3
10.8% or greater 7.9 7.1
Taxation excluded.
22. Taking 4.0% as the breakpoint, the differences in number of seigneurial rights and in
proportion of grievances about the seigneurial system are both significant at£ < .001.
surely w e would find that the king or the m onarchical system w as associated
with the seigneurial regim e. The king, after all, held extensive seigneurial
rights o f his ow n, collected along with aides, traites, and gabelles by the
Royal G eneral Farm s.23 On occasion, com plaints about royal claim s to hunt
could parallel com plaints about seigneurial on es.24 Yet our analysis o f the
presence or absence o f favorable m entions o f the king or discussions o f the
principle o f m onarchy, show s no relation w hatsoever to discussion o f
seigneurial institutions. T here is no spillover from the fact that the king was
a seigneur to an association o f the royal and the seigneurial in the cahiers.
Institutional linkages then did not wholly control ideological ones. If the tithe
is so strongly linked, is it only because o f the institutional blurriness? N o,
there m ust be m ore at issue here. The seigneurial regim e is not o ily a
coherent entity for the Third Estate cahiers in which discussion o f any right
leads to discussion o f others, but that w hole is connected in a discrim inating
w ay to other entities. D oes this add up to a conception o f a larger w hole o f
which the seigneurial regim e is a part?
Looking Downstream: August 4, 1789

Since 1789 the seigneurial rights have been located within an unending
discussion o f feudalism . We are assured by som e historians that the destruc
tion o f feudalism was the central accom plishm ent o f the Revolution while
others argue that feudalism did not exist in any meaningful form by the
late eighteenth century. Still other w riters urge us to discover what the
revolutionaries meant when they used the term , as they did extensively.
We shall consider this question at som e length in Chapter 9. In this
section, I exam ine the w ays in which som e broad notion o f feudalism was
already im plicit in the cahiers o f the spring. A s a referen ce point, let us
glance ahead at the primal docum ent around which the w hole com plex
pattern o f subsequent revolutionary legislation evolved: the d ecree o f
August 4, 1789. The dramatic and animated discussions o f the National
A ssem bly w ere actually given three different form al versions: the rough-
and-ready summary adopted in the small hours o f August 5; a m ore careful
summary officially enacted the next m orning as a basis for further discussion;
and, finally, the series o f articles adopted in final form over the subsequent
23. The acquisition of these seigneurial rights (and those of the church) by the revolutionary
state was a component of the durability of its support for the indemnification option.
24. Writing on hunting in general and on royal hunting in particular, the Third Estate of Mantes
demands: “that individuals as well as the king, yes, the king himself—the first organ of the law
cannot believe himself absolved from the obligation to be just—are to repair damages done by
game” CAP3:672).
days culminating on August 11. I shall take the first, rough summary as a
statem ent o f what the National Assem bly thought belonged together with
seigneurial rights.25
The articles enacted form a fascinating lis t T he seigneurial rights are
m entioned first o f all, with special attention to serfdom and mainmorte,
seigneurial ju stice, and the recreational privileges: hunting and raising
pigeons and rabbits. The tithe is to be turned into a m oney paym ent and its
elim ination through indem nification is to be perm itted. Tax privileges are to
be elim inated at once. All citizens are to be eligible for all positions. Justice
is to be free. The purchase o f office is to be done away with. Provincial and
tow n privileges are ended. Church paym ents to Rom e are to be ended. M any
church benefices are to be suppressed. Im properly obtained governm ent
pensions are to go. Finally, the guilds are to be reform ed. We may take this
broad list to enum erate the institutions that w ere part and parcel o f
"feudalism " as it appeared to the revolutionaries o f the sum m er o f 1789. To
what extent had these sam e institutions been, at least im plicitly, tied
together with the seigneurial regim e for the authors o f the cahiers, several
m onths earlier?
Tithe, Benefice, Payments to Rome

Table 4.11 exam ines the associations with these institutions. The tithe w e
have already explored. We see here that the authors o f the cahiers also
coupled benefices with the seigneurial regim e. One bitter com plaint was the
noble hold on the obtaining o f benefices. We shall see shortly that this is a
facet o f a broad association o f privileged career opportunities and the
seigneurial regim e. Although there is a general linkage with the church, as
shown above, there is no strong association o f the annates (a paym ent to
Rom e when certain benefices changed hands) with seigneurial rights as
shown in the second colum n.
Tax Privileges
We failed to find any association with tax advantages, either in general or
specifically, as m entioned in the d ecrees, for province or tow n. This
dem onstrates that seigneurial rights w ere not yet linked in the spring o f
1789 to the Old Regim e’s full range o f privilege, a point to which w e shall
return in this chapter.
25. See 4P 8:350. One might, alternatively, have chosen either of the other two summaries, an
amalgam of aQthree, or an inventory of al institutions mentioned in the debates, even if rejected
for inclusion on al three lists (colonial slavery, for example). A fuller discussion of the decrees of
August 4-11 is found in Chapters 8 and9.
Ih b le 4 .1 1 . Differences in Discussions o f Seigneurial Regime in Third Estate Cahiers

Associated with Other Institutions Cited in Summary o f the Debate o f August 4,1789
Institution Cited in Seigneurial Rights a Percentage o f AD
D ecree o f August 4,1789 Discussed Grievances
Tithe 2.4*** 1.4% **

Ecclesiastical benefices 3.5*** 1.5*
Annates 2.7*** 0.8
Tax advantages 0.4 - 0 .5
Tax advantages for nobility 0.7 0.4
Tax advantages for province - 1 .6 - 1 .1
Tax advantages for towns 0.9 0.9
Guilds 0.8 - 0 .8
Pensions 2.7*** 0.7
Venality o f office 1.6** 0.4
Posts and careers in
government service 1.7** 1.1*
Posts and careers in church 2.2*** 1.2**
Posts and careers in judiciary 1.3* 1.1*
Posts and careers in military 2.8*** 2.3***
All concerns about posts and
careers 4.9*** 3.3***
Judicial expense 0.5 0.2
*p < .05 (1 tailed t-test).

**p < .01 (1 tailed t-test).
***P < .001 (1 tailed t-test).
Guilds, Pensions, Venality of Office

If the guilds, the practice o f governm ent pensions, and the venality o f office
seem ed part o f "feudalism ” on August 4, they did not have so d ear an
association several m onths before. Although venality and pensions do occur
in docum ents that discuss a w ider range o f seigneurial institutions they are
not associated with proportionally m ore attention to the seigneurial regim e;
the linkage with the guilds is even w eaker. A plausible association with any
o f the three might have been possible. The pensions might have been view ed
as a continuation o f the taming o f the (»ice-dangerous feudal m agnates. In
this vein, these paym ents might have been taken as another survival o f
financial rew ard no longer accom panied by public function, and thereby
subject to one o f the central critiques o f the seigneurial regim e.26 To the
26. As the Third Estate of Montpellier puts it, “Suppress all rights established by the lords over
their vassals or commoner dependents in time of war or disorder for reasons that no longer exist”
(AP 4:58). Might not such reasoning also embrace government payoffs to politically threatening
lords? If those with armed force in the Middle Ages, in this view, had seized (or been freely given)
critics o f venality, public affairs needed to be separated from private

concerns. Venality o f office might be seen as part o f som e sort o f neo-feudal
dispersal o f public pow er,272
8a m ajor barrier to the form ation o f an effective
central bureaucracy, rather than as a step toward central authority as it
might have been seen earlier. This would be particularly plausible in light o f
M eeker's recent efforts to undo the stranglehold o f venal officeholding on
the tax system . “ A s for the guilds, they represented, as did the seigneurial
regim e, a corporate and stably hierarchical im age o f society. The free
exercise o f an individual’s productive capacity and his gifts for imaginative
innovation w ere as circum scribed in the artisans’ associations as they w ere
in the countryside; the freedom to undertake industrial activity as lim ited
and as hedged in with restrictions as the m arket in land; the w eb o f
obligations, privileges, and immunities in which m em bers participated as
pervasive as in the seigneurie; the fixing o f an individual in a schem e that
defined one’s place in society and which allocated social honor— all these
w ere com m on to the w orld o f the guilds and the seigneurial w orld alike.29
One would think that the belief that the guilds “ suffocate m aterial industri
ousness”30 was w idely shared. But although the seigneurial regim e w as
seen in such com pany by early August, it w as not yet located there in
the spring.
Career Opportunities
One facet o f the society o f privilege already linked to the w orld o f the lords
was the question o f access to careers. A great deal has been w ritten on the
hold o f the nobility on the heights o f pow er, w hether in the central
adm inistration, the judiciary, the church, or the m ilitary. The extent and
nature o f the noble m onopoly on posts and careers, the degree to which
that m onopoly was (or was not) becom ing tighter, the m echanism s by which
com m oners might be ennobled, and the possible consequences o f blocked
m obility for Third Estate radicalism have all received much scholarly atten
tion.31 This was an arena o f significant concern to the Third E state: there
seigneurial rights, might not one similarly see the great rebels of the seventeenth century as being
put on the government payroll?
27. On the use of some such concept in the analysis of the venal officers on the part of recent
historians, see Ralph E. Giesey, “State-Building in Early Modem France: The Role of Royal
Officialdom,” ¿Mmol ofModemHistory 55 (1983): 191-207.
28. J. F. Bosher, French Finances, 1770-1795: From Business to Bureaucracy (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1970), 125-65.
29. William H. Sewell Jr., Work andRevolution in France: The Language ofLabor From the Old
Regime to 1848 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 25-37.
30. Third Estate cahier of St-Pierre-le-Moutier, AP 5:638.
31. Elmore G. Barber, TheBourgeoisie in 18th-CenturyFrance (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1955); Gdbert Shapiro andJohn Markoff, RevolutionaryDemands: A ContentAnalysis of the
are many demands that only technical qualifications and achievem ent, not
birth, be considered; that m em bers o f the Third Estate be perm itted access
to this or that career (or to careers in general); that, as one reads repeatedly
in the cahiers, careers m ust be open to talent Som e 27% o f Third
Estate cahiers concern them selves with adm inistrative posts in the central
governm ent 42% with ecclesiastical careers, 43% with judicial appoint
m ents, and a rather spectacular 77% with the military. Indeed only a scant
9% evince no such concerns. This was not only an im portant subject to the
Third E state but the very subject on which their differences with the nobility
w ere m ost sharp.32
Returning to Table 4.11, w e see how consistently these m atters are
discussed by the sam e docum ents that focu s on the seigneurial rights.
(Perhaps, as suggested above, the association with benefices is sym ptom atic
o f similar con cern s.) Indeed the eighteen docum ents with no interest at all
in m obility issues are also dramatically different than the vast m ajority. T hey
take up alm ost 5 few er seigneurial rights and devote 3% few er o f their
grievances to the seigneurial regim e. We have found no other feature o f the
cahiers o f the Third Estate that so sharply distinguishes the docum ents that
focus (Hi seigneurial rights.
Am ong the specific career channels that w e have distinguished, the
military stands out for the strength o f its association with the seigneurial
regim e as w ell as for the sheer num ber o f concerned Third Estate docu
m ents. Perhaps this is due to the recent intense public attention given to
the 1781 ordinance that barred from the officer corps, not m erely com m on
ers, but those without four generations o f nobility (Hi the father’s side. W ith
a few exceptions— the artillery, those already officers— the new law insisted
that future generals or even lieutenants would not m erely be noble but very
noble indeed. David Bien has shown persuasively that this contraction o f
opportunity was not so much directed against the aspirations o f a bourgeoisie
that was largely excluded to begin with as it was a triumph for the old
military fam ilies against the upstarts rooted in the venal officialdom o f the
judiciary and the royal adm inistration.33 The "nobility o f the sw ord ," to use
the social term inology o f the day, had won caie o f its rare victories over the
“ nobility o f the rob e.” N evertheless, it does not follow that it was perceived
by the urban notables o f the tim e as a m ere intra-nobility dispute;34 and the
Cahiers deDolíanos of1789 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), chap. 18; David D. Bien,
“La réaction aristocratique avant 1789; L’Exemple de l’armée,” Amules: Economies, Sociétés,
Civilisations 29 (1974): 23-48, 505-34.
32. Markoff and Shapiro, "Consensus and Conflict at the Onset of Revolution,” 44-46.
33. David D. Bien, "La réaction aristocratique avant 1789: L’exemple de l’armée,” Amules:
Economies, Sociétés, Civilisations 29 (1974): 515—16.
34. Following the resonant image of an increasing constriction of opportunity for a talented
commoner elite that flourished on the eve of revolution, many have seen the Ségur law as a
significant momentinashuttingdownof previously openchannels. See Barber, Bourgeoisie, 122-23.
Ideological C onstruction o p the S eigneurial R egim e 167
Ségur law, m oreover, certainly called attention in a dram atic w ay to m ilitary

careers. But what w e suspect is m ore significant, is that the issues
dram atized by the 1781 ordinance shared in som e o f the m ythology o f
seigneurial rights. The assertion o f a m onopoly on m ilitary skills and service
was a basis (Hi which a claim to general deference and financial com pensation
might (Hice have helped sustain the seigneurial regim e. This assertion had
now to som e extent been transferred to the defense o f job s in the army o f
the French state. The defense was now , in the m odem eighteenth century,
articulated as a professional concern .35 The claim o f the lords to a m onopoly
chi the right to strut in public with sw ords on their hips and o f the nobility
o f the sw ord to a m onopoly on m ilitary careers drew on a com m on
sym bolic heritage.36
The nobles o f Laon beautifully articulated the intim acy with which the
very idea o f a distinctive nobility was fused with the profession o f arm s: “ No
public office or em ploym ent may confer nobility, unless a subject o f the
Third Estate is so deserving that the E states o f his province ask such an
honor for him. But all brilliant feats o f arm s in war shall be rew arded by
titles o f hereditary nobility— even for a com m on soldier” (A P 6:140). For
their part, the nobles o f Lim oges demand: “ That the bearing o f arm s may
only be tolerated for m ilitary personnel in uniform and for nobles dressed in
any manner w hatsoever.”37 The bearing o f arms is held to be essentially a
noble status m arker w hereas soldiers m ust dress in a manner to show
them selves w orthy o f their w eapons. The fusion o f a m ystique o f honor with
a claim on incom e and pow er that characterized the defense o f seigneurial
rights was shared with noble claim s on high office, and now here m ore than
in the arm ed forces.
Judicial Expense
Thming now to the last item gleaned from the August 4 identification o f
feudalism w e see no association w hatsoever betw een the seigneurial regim e
and the expense o f judicial procedure. Such an association, how ever, is by
no m eans unimaginable, and, o f course, w as imagined on August 4. The
existen ce o f a profusion o f overlapping jurisdictions, uncertain judicial
35. How could those not brought up with military values hope to acquire the skils of a modem
officer? asked the spokesmen of the nobles of the sword. A magical transmission of noble prowess
through blood had been transformed into the creation of anappropriate environment for professional
socialization. See Bien, “La réaction aristocratique,” 521-26.
36. Note that artillery officers whose competence was measurable by an al too unambiguous
reality test—whether or not they could point a camón at something and hit it—were excluded from
such symbolic baggage.
37. AP 3:569. Quite consistent with the view that nobles are in some essential sense bearers of
arms, this document insists that aB nobles shall have the right to enter military service. In this
conception, military service appears as anextension andexpression of nobikty.
spheres o f com petence, and a com plex, confusing, uncertain, and exhausting
appeals p rocess w ere all grievances som etim es aimed at the seigneurial
cou rts.38 We find indeed, as Table 4.12 show s, quite a consistent association
o f discussions o f the seigneurial courts and the royal courts in the spring o f
1789. The seigneurial courts, in short, w ere seen as courts as w ell as
seigneurial.39 What the cahiers failed to exhibit, how ever, was a clear
association o f the specific feature o f the judicial system m entioned in the
August 4 d ecree, with the seigneurial rights as a w hole.
Conclusions
The debate and discussion surrounding the proclam ation o f the com plete
destruction o f feudalism show s us what the seigneurial regim e seem ed a
part o f in the sum m er o f 1789. Pierre G oubert, not im plausibly, can read
their d ecrees as the revolutionaries' ow n definition in practice o f feudalism .40
An exam ination o f the grievances com posed several m onths earlier show s
lM > le 4 .1 2 . Discussions o f Seigneurial Courts in Third Estate Cahiers by Extent o f

Discussion of Other Courts
Number o f Grievances Percentage of

Concerning Courts Documents Discussing
(Other than Seigneurial Justice
Seigneurial Courts) in General N
0 -6 24% 50
7-12 48 58
13-18 57 44
19 or greater 54 46
38. Wide this judgment seems a commonplace in the historical literature, some cahiers see the
seigneurial courts, locally accessible as they were, as a mechanism to keep court costs down.
Sutherland has recently stressed this facet of seigneurial justice in Brittany (Chouans, 183). Even
inthe same region, opinion could easily differ. The Third Estate of Beauvais reports that some local
villagers want to maintain seigneurial courts while others are opposed; the Third Estate cahier
merely reports the division, taking no position of its own CAP2:301). See also Chapter 3.
39. Based on his reading of the parish cahiers of the Sarthe, Paul Bois has contended that, in the
villages, the seigneurial courts were not seen as seigneurial at aH Complaints about seigneurial
justice, he suggests, were part of a program of judicial reform and have little to do with social
conflict between lords and peasants. To whatever degree one may generalize Bois’s analysis to rural
France as a whole (as MackreD appears to do), it is clearly inappropriate for the Third Estate. See
Paul Bois, Lespaysans de FOuest: Des structures tconomiques et sociales aux optionspolitiques depuis
rtpoqtu révolutionnaire dans la Sarthe (Le Mans: Imprimerie M. Vilaire, 1960), 167; John Q. C.
MackreD, TheAttach on “Feudalism" m Eighteenth-Century France (London: Routledge and Kegan
Paul. 1973). 172.
40. Pierre Goubert, TheAncien Régime: French Society, 1600-1750 (New Ybrfc Harper, 1969),
5-7.
that only part o f this form ulation was then clearly in {dace. The ecclesiastical
institutions singled out on August 4 as w ell as restrictions cm m obility
opportunities w ere already clearly associated with the seigneurial regim e.
But tax privileges w ere not, nor w ere the guilds, nor w ere the pensions,
nor w as venality o f office, nor w ere court costs. We see here a stage in the
form ation o f a conception o f the seigneurial regim e by the revolutionary
conquerors. B y the sum m er a broad, som e might say am orphous, concep
tion o f feudalism was elaborated, to the dism ay o f historians debating their
own ideas o f feudalism ever since. The seigneurial rights w ere a central part
o f this conception and indeed o f the revolutionaries’ conception o f the Old
Regim e, which having been killed could be named and perhaps im agined.41
The w eb o f associations in the cahiers advanced this vision a significant
distance, but was as yet far short o f the ideological construction o f the Revo
lution.
The Society of Privilege

L et us extract from the protean sense o f “feudalism ” em erging in 1789, the
m ore specific notion o f privilege. Jerom e Blum has made a forceful case that
the seigneurial regim e in France can be seen as part o f a larger structure o f
dependence, social distinction, and privilege. In much o f Europe in the
eighteenth century peasants ow ed servile obligations (w hose w eight varied
greatly) to lords w ho w ere m ost often m em bers o f a legally distinct nobility
m arked out by a large variety o f rights and im m unities.42 Blum attem pts to
treat the liberation o f the peasants o f Europe and the erosion o f the
hierarchy o f orders as a single, if com plex, m ovem ent In his view the
em ancipation o f rural Europe is part and parcel o f a generalized shift from
traditional orders to m odem classes as the central set o f significant social
distinctions (4 1 8 -4 4 ). The unparalleled condem natory pow er o f the notion
o f privilege was recognized by a no less em inent observer o f the political
crisis than Louis XVI when he attem pted to order a halt to the current
designation o f the clergy and nobility as “the privileged.”43 To what degree
41. Diego Venturino, “La naissance de l’Ancien Régime," in Cobn Lucas, ed., The French
Revolution and the Creation of Modem Political Culture, voL 2, The Political Culture of the French
Revolution (Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1988), 11-40.
42. Jerome Blum, The End of the Old Order m Rural Europe (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1978), 11-28.
43. Ina letter from mid-June 1789, Louis wrote: “I disapprove of the repetition of the expression
privileged classes that the Third Estate is using to indicate the first two orders. These novel
expressions are good only to perpetuate a spirit of divisiveness" <AP 8:129). See also Philippe
Roger, “The French Revolution as ‘Logomachy,’ ” inJohn Renwick, ed., Language andRhetoric of
the Revolution (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1990), 11. On the powerful equation of
w ere the seigneurial rights, as Blum’s w ork suggests, seen as part o f the
structure o f privilege in the spring o f 1789? We have already seen in Table
4.11 that privileged claim s to careers in governm ent service and church, in
the judiciary, and in the military w ere, but tax privileges w ere not, associ
ated with the seigneurial rights. The guilds, exem plars o f a vision erf a
corporate order, w ere also a wholly separate m atter in our texts.
Table 4.13 explores several arenas o f noble privilege that w e have not yet
covered. W e see that, for the Third Estate at least, there d oes not seem to
be m uch m ore support for this tem pting hypothesis that the critique o f the
seigneurial regim e w as a part o f a m ultistranded critique o f privilege than
w e have already seen. Explicit attacks on privilege in diverse institutional
areas occu r in four Third Estate cahiers out o f five. T here is no question
that this is a highly significant area o f com plaint for the urban notables; but
it is not significantly related to the seigneurial regim e. N or is the right o f
ammittimus, the nobles’ highly visible privilege o f im m ediate appearance
before a high court w ithout struggling one’s way up the exhausting ladder o f
judicial appeal. N or is the fundamental principle o f the distinction o f noble
and com m oner. W hat, in 1789, could better stand for the entire society o f
orders than the traditional vote by order o f the E states-G eneral? Yet those
many cahiers o f the Third E state that endorsed, in som e m easure, the
principle o f vote by head are not m ore prone to discuss the seigneurial
Ifeble 4 .1 3 . Differences in Discussions o f Seigneurial Regime in Third Estate Cahiers

Associated with Discussions erf Distinctions among the Orders
Distinctions Seigneurial Rights a Percentage o f All
Among Orders Discussed Grievances
Attack on privilege, afl institutional

contexts 1.2 -0 .1 %
Single tax roll (proposal that
all— nobles and commoners
alike— appear on same hst) 2.6*** 1.4**
Noble right to be heard by high
court in first instance
(committimus) 1.0 0.2
Nobility 1.0 - 0 .2
Vote by head in Estates-General 0.9 0.6
**P < .01 (1 tailed t-test).

***p < .001 (1 tailed t-test).
“privilege” and “nobility” by Sieyès, see WiBam H. SeweOJr., A Rhetoric ofBourgeois Revotuhon:
TheAbbéSieyes and WhatIs the ThirdEstate? (Durham: Duke University Press, 1994).
regim e than the small m inority that are silen t (Third E state support for
vote by order is virtually n on existen t)
Although tax privileges generally are not related to seigneurial rights, w e
find, how ever, that it is otherw ise for the specific question o f tax rolls. T he
privileged insisted, and had largely obtained, that when taxed at aO, they
would be listed in rolls distinct from those for com m oners. Since every tax
tended to be separately adm inistered, this added a substantial adm inistrative
burden to an already com plex tax system . For the nobles, the w ish to avoid
having their nam es contam inated by residing on the sam e p iece o f paper
with those o f com m oners was joined to the benefits o f obfuscating their
relatively low rates o f assessm en t (This is another instance o f a claim o f
honor in the service o f in te re st) That tax rolls but not the differential
assessm ents them selves are taken up in those cahiers that are particularly
concerned with the seigneurial regim e, is ju st another indication o f how
lim ited was the link, in the spring o f 1789, with a broader sen se o f a society
o f privilege. That sen se would grow with the Revolution.
Communal Rights
In rejectin g a corporate and hierarchical society in the spring o f 1789, the
Third E state did not yet speak o f the seigneurial rights and the guilds as
tw o aspects o f a single structure as their representatives w ere to d o a few
m onths later. But much closer to the seigneurial regim e in con crete
everyday life w ere the corporate claim s o f the rural com m unity. Even if the
corporate structure o f urban life w as not seen as connected to the lords o f
the countryside, the corporate structure o f rural France may have seem ed
intertw ined with seigneurial authority. If artisans and shopkeepers w ere
m em bers o f an industrial o r com m ercial com m unity in which they had rights
and which had rights over them , the communal rights44 o f rural France w ere
at least equally pow erful. D ecisions about what to plant, how to w ork the
soil, when to harvest or what sort o f tools to use w ere all highly constrained
by a variety o f collective claim s. The seigneur, like the individual peasants,
lived with or struggled against these communal rights. B y virtue o f likeness
and by virtue o f opposition seigneurial and communal authority m ay have
been linked for the Third Estate in 1789.
Likeness: In their analyses o f French econom ic life, the physiocrats
argued that the seigneur and the com m unity both restricted the unfettered
44. The classic works of Marc Bloch are st9 the principal touchstones for the study of the
multifaceted interrelations of seigneurs and peasant communities. See Les caractères originaux de
{histoire ruralefrançaise (Paris: ArmandCohn, 1964) and“La kitte pour l'individualisme agraire dans
la France du XVÜIe siècle.” Armales ¿Histoire Economique et Sociale 2 (1930): 329-81, 511-56.
developm ent o f the m arket45 The “ direct rights” o f the lords restricted the
freedom to dispose o f one’s property at w ill; to mill one’s grain, press one’s
grapes, bake one’s bread w here one w ished; to labor free o f judicial and
political constraint; to ch oose one’s crops (sin ce holders o f champart— and
tithe— resisted juridically uncertain innovations); and, should the lord have
the right o f ban de vendange, moisson, or fauchaison, the freedom to decide
when to harvest w as restricted as w ell. The communal rights dictated w ork
rhythm s, im peded risky adoption o f new crops, dictated lim its in seeking
individual advantage, and regulated com m on patterns o f grazing.
Opposition: T he seigneur as an individual often found it was his ow n
interest that w as shackled by the communal rights. If animals could wander
freely, could the seigneur en close his land and rem ove him self from the
collectively dictated w ork rhythm s? Should he desire to rationalize his
agricultural activity, he m ight run up against communal protections fo r the
im poverished.
T he rights o f the com m unity and the rights o f the seigneur w ere so
intertw ined, in short, that they may w ell have been experienced as aspects
o f a single, communal rural w orld. We shall ask w hether this was in fact the
case. Table 4.14 show s that som e 70% o f Third E state assem blies had
som ething to say about communal rights. The single m ost w idely discussed
issue was the rights on w oods. A s a place o f uncultivated land w here animals
could wander, as a source o f food fallen to the forest floor (acorns, say), as
a living w arehouse o f w ood itself (w hich could be used dom estically for fuel,
building, or artisanal shaping, as w ell as sold for cash), the question o f w ho
ow ned these lands was o f the greatest significance. The related questions
o f com m on land, pasturage rights, and enclosures also received their share
o f attention. Animals m ight feed unfenced on the com m ons; they m ight
graze on land left fallow by com m unity obligation (vaine pâture); they m ight
munch on the stubble that one was required to leave, rather than cut one’s
crops to the ground; and several com m unities m ight have mutual and
reciprocal grazing rights (parcours). The seigneurs might assert a claim on
a portion o f the com m ons o f one-third or even tw o-thirds; and, by the right
o f “ separate herd” (troupeau à part) claim an exem ption from an obligation
to join his animals to the com m on grazing herd, a right he m ight profitably
sell to stock-raising interests. T here w ere, then, seigneurial aspects to the
com plex o f communal rights. On the other hand, much conflict in rural
France in the eighteenth century involved the lord’s attem pt to erod e those
rights that hindered him and the rural com m unity’s attem pt at defen se, a
pattem o f conflict that Saint Jacob has de scribed m agnificently for Bur
45. See George« Weulerese, Lapkysiocratie à Faute de la Involution, 1781-1792 (Paris: Editions
de l’Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, 1965), 86-105.
gundy.46 T he general clim ate o f uncertainty as to w ho had what rights

over land encouraged endless litigation, not only costly in itself, but very
discouraging to any potential investor in expensive p rojects for increasing
agricultural yields, such as drainage or irrigation.47
Table 4.15 show s the associations for those aspects o f the com munal
claim s that occu r with sufficient frequency to make these tabulations mean
ingful. Som e o f the collective rights the Third E state cared about are indeed
linked to the seigneurial regim e. M ost strongly associated was an arena o f
conflict. T he com m unities' claim s for the use o f forested areas conflicted
w ith the lords’ desire to expand the area under cultivation and, perhaps
m ore im portant, with the desire to profit from the sharply rising price o f
w ood. This conflict was greatly exacerbated in the eighteenth century by
other claim s: o f m erchants hoping to furnish a grow ing urban population
with the raw m aterials for building and carpentry, o f royal officials' inade
quate attem pts at long-term conservation o f an essential naval resou rce. A
dim ate o f individual evasion o f the laws and collective resistance flourished:
The w oods becam e a focu s o f contestation betw een peasants and sei
gneurs.48 It is understandable, then, that when the urban notables w rote o f
Ih b le 4 .1 4 . Third Estate Cahiers Discussing Communal Rights (% )
Miscellaneous right 36%

Communal rights in general 10
Rights cm w oods 39
Common land 26
Seigneur’s claim to portion o f commons 18
Enclosures 26
Gleaning (glanage) 4
Pasturing rights (pacage) 22
Obligation to leave land fallow (vainepâture) 11
Mutual grazing rights between two communities {parcours) 18
Seigneur*s right to separate pasturing {troupeau à parí) 4
Seigneurial encroachments 4
Any discussion o f communal rights 70
46. Pierre de Samt Jacob, Les paysans de la Bourgogne du Nord au dernier siècle de FAnaen
Régime (Paris: Société Les Belles Lettres, 1960), 377-86,488-89.
47. Jean-Laurent Rosenthal’s study is quite compelling an the adverse impact for investment of
the legal donate surrounding property rights; see The Fruits of Revolution: Property Rights,
Litigation andFrenchAgriculture, 1700-1860 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992).
48. Andrée Corvo!, “Forêt et communautés en Basse Bourgogne au dix-huitième siècle,” Revue
Historique 256 (1976): 15-36; and ‘‘Les délinquances forestières en Basse-Bourgogne depuis la
réformation de 1711-1718,” Revue Historique 259 (1978): 345-88; Christian Desplat, “La forêt
béarnaise au XVTIIe siècle, " Annales du Midi 85 (1973): 147-71; Saint Jacob, ñeysans de la
Bourgogne duNord, 488-90 and passim; Denis Woronoff, “Les châteaux, entreprises forestières et
industrielles aux XVÜe et XVDÜe siècles,” in André Chastel, ed.. Le château, la chasse et la fortt
(Bordeaux: Editions Sud-Ouest, 1990), 115-26. See also Chapter 5.
the com m unity’s rights on w oodland, they w ere likely to also w rite o f a
w ider variety o f seigneurial rights and focu s m ore o f their attention on the
Issues o f pasturing also raised questions o f seigneurial rights. On the
other hand, the related questions o f the com m ons and o f enclosures did n o t
I suggest that in conflicts o f lord and com m unity over the com m ons and over
enclosure, the Third E state would have been likely to favor individual
proprietorship and enclosure rights. T h ese are part o f the agricultural
program o f physiocracy, for exam ple. On this particular issue, in other
w ords, the lord 's side in lord-com m unity conflicts is seen, by the Third
E state, as the side o f the angels. In the construction o f an im age o f a
retrogressive seigneurial regim e, part and parcel o f a w ide variety o f social
ills, seigneurial attem pts to rationalize m arket-oriented production have no
{dace. It is only detested elem ents m rural life that are to be adm itted into
the conception o f the seigneurial. Recall how w e saw in Chapter 2 that it
was precisely those elem ents o f the seigneurial order that constituted
im pedim ents to the m arket on which the Third E state placed greatest
stress. On the other hand, the specific notion that lords have a claim to a
portion o f the com m ons is view ed with ill-fa vor surely the presence o f such
a claim would discourage peasants from seeking to divide their lands.
Ik b le 4 .1 5 . Differences in Discussions o f Seigneurial Regime Associated with

Discussions o f Communal Rights in Third Estate Cahiers
Seigneurial Rights a Percentage o f A I
Communal Rights* Discussed Grievances
Miscellaneous communal rights 1.4* 0.2%

Communal rights in general 2.1 0
Rights on woods 2.4*** 1.8***
Common land 0.9 0.3
Seigneur’s claim on portion o f
common land 2.3** 1.5*
Enclosures 1.2 1.2
Pasturing (pacage) 1.7* 1.3*
Obligation to leave land fallow
(vainepâture) 0.9 0
Mutual grazing rights between two
communities (parcours) 2.5** 1.3*
Any communal right 2.8*** 1.8***
*P < .05 (1 tailed t-test).

**p < .01 (1 tailed t-test).
***p < .001 (1 tailed t-test).
‘Includes communal rights discussed in at least ten Third Estate cahiers
Ideological Construction of the Seigneurial Regime 175
C onsider, in sum , that the urban notables w ere concerned far m ore than the
others with issues o f econom ic developm en t49 W ere they not likely to
endorse enclosures and individual innovation them selves—and thereby not
regard this m atter as especially connected w ith the w orld o f the seigneurs
at all?
Economic Development
In considering the proposition that the seigneurial regim e was seen to be
intim ately linked to the collective rights o f the rural com m unity, w e had
to consider the com m itm ent to econom ic developm ent o f Third E state
assem blies. It seem s plausible that seigneurial rights would earn the hostile
attention o f the follow ers o f the new and prestigious econom ic doctrines
that aim ed at the advancem ent o f wealth through the release o f individual
energies from social constraint MackreQ has suggested that the econom ic
thinkers o f the eighteenth century “ defined the State in term s which left no
room for the justification o f privilege on grounds o f m ilitary prow ess”50 and
so presum ably underm ined the defense o f seigneurial rights. T heir vision
posited a w orld in which the claim s o f the lords w ere largely irrelevant
T hey did n o t MackreQ asserts, directly challenge the lords, but “ deprived
o f nourishm ent in the form o f controversy and attention, political and social
claim s which w ere based on an imaginary feudal past tended to perish from
inanition” (77).
T h ere is, how ever, a body o f econom ic thought in the eighteenth century
that w ent w ell beyond the inattention to the seigneurial regim e that charac
terizes the cham pions o f com m ercial enterprise taken up by MackreQ. T he
physiocrats w ere insistent in their opposition to barriers to the m ovem ent o f
goods, to taxation levied on the gross product o f agriculture, to m onopolistic
econom ic privilege; to a dispersion o f property rights that discouraged
investm ent in agriculture; to direct claim s on labor that detracted from
cultivation, and to barriers to free sale and purchase o f grain. The agricul
tural developm entalism o f these thinkers, then, constituted a vigorous
inteUectual chaüenge to seigneurial toüs, to the champart, to mainmorte,
mutation fees and retrait, to seigneurial hunting rights, to com pulsory labor
services, to claim s over fairs and m arkets, in a w ord, to m uch o f the
49. Ninety-nine percent of the cahiers of the Third Estate discuss commerce as compared to
89% of the NobSty and 49% of the parishes. For industry and manufacturing, the percentages are
79%, 48%, 13%; for finance, 71%, 55%, 8%; for transportation, 89%, 64%, 68%; for agriculture,
98%, 81%, 79%.
50. Mackrefl, TheAttack on Feudalism, 77.
seigneurial system .51 A s the Old Regim e drifted tow ard its crisis, then, a
pow erful body o f thought was developing a critique o f the seigneurial regim e
as a barrier to econom ic developm ent Did this critique enter into the Third
E state’s attack on seigneurial rights in 1789?
Agriculture
Alm ost every Third E state cahier had som ething to say concerning France’s
agriculture, as shown in Table 4.16. We may identify several distinct areas
o f concern for the French rural econom y.
• Encouragements to agriculture are proposals to offer financial subsidies

to those w ho would adopt new agricultural products or practices, such
as forage crops or artificial m eadows (prairies artificielles).
• Rewards for achievement in agriculture are proposals that the state
rew ard conspicuous su ccess or fruitful innovation either sym bolically
(m edals, citations, proclam ations, m em bership in honorary ord ers) or
financially (prizes, pensions).
• Protective measures for crops and lands include discussions o f a variety
o f sou rces o f damage against which rem edies are required. T h ese
include: livestock disease; destructive animals, ranging from w olves to
partridges; erosion ; floods; and industrial w astes.
• Developing new lands for cultivation covers discussions o f draining
m arshes and clearing forests.
• Developing new products includes both new or im proved sou rces o f
Thble 4 .1 6 . Third Estate Cahiers Dealing with A spects o f the Developm ent o f French
Agriculture (% )
Encouragem ents to agriculture 40%

Protective m easures for crops 40
Developing new land for cultivation 28
Developing new crops 4
Agricultural m ethods 16
Production o f alcoholic beverages 18
Grain 43
Animal raising 17
Any discussion o f agricultural improvement 97
51. Weulersse, Mouvement pkysiocratùjue, 1:270-73, 419-22, 434-37, 442-47, 449, 510-13.
Mackrell also treats the physiocrats in The Attack on Feudalism, 138-50. Some of the social
criticism of the physiocrats was directed more at the royal rather than the seigneurial version of an
institution (as in the case of the corvées), but the principles documented by Weulersse unquestionably
cover the seigneurial rights as welL
human food such as potatoes, and discussions o f the as yet lim ited use
o f forage crops for animals (clover, com , alfalfa).
• Agricultural methods for the increase and im provem ent o f products
includes discussions o f fertilizer, irrigation, m eadow s, cultivation, and
crop rotation.
• Alcoholic beverages
• Animal raising
• Gram
T he striking thing about this list and Table 4.17 is that not one o f these
subjects is associated with greater attention paid to the seigneurial regim e
although many o f these concerns are part and parcel o f the physiocratic
program . To the extent that cahiers discussing these m atters tend to take
up a larger num ber o f seigneurial rights, this seem s largely a function o f
both subjects being m ore likely in longer docum ents.
But this hardly m eans that the social life o f rural France is not seen as
intim ately tied to the seigneurial regim e. H un now from econom ic develop
m ent to questions o f land tenure. Our global land-tenure category deals with
leaseholds and sharecropping; with questions o f ease o f land purchase and
with landless rural laborers; with m odes o f recruitm ent o f a w orkforce and
1 fe b le 4 .1 7 . D ifferences in Discussions o f Seigneurial Regime A ssociated with

D iscussions o f the Developm ent o f French Agriculture in Third Estate Cahiers
A spects o f Agricultural Seigneurial Rights a Percentage o f All
Development* Discussed Grievances
Encouragem ents to
agriculture 1.0* -0 .2 %
Rewards for achievem ent in
agriculture 2.2** 0.6
Protective m easures for
crops 2.2*** 0.5
Developing new land for
cultivation 1.4* 0
Agricultural m ethods 1.5* 0.1
Production o f alcoholic
beverages -0 .1 -0 .6
Animal raising 1.3 -0 .1
Any discussion o f
agricultural improvement 1.9** 0.6
*p< .05 (1 tailed t-test).

**p< .01 (1 tailed t-test).
***/> < .001 (1 tailed t-test).
‘Indudes aspects of agricultural development discussed in at least ten Third Estate cahiers
with social conflict over ow nership.52 Table 4.18 show s a d ea r association

betw een concern with such m atters and the seigneurial regim e. For d ie
Third E state in the spring o f 1789, the seigneurial regim e w as, then, m ost
definitely located in a region o f concern for rural claim s on resou rces: daim s
o f peasant com m unities and claim s o f property holders.53 But w hether the
resou rces w ere used effectively or squandered, w hether French agriculture
prospered or stagnated appears to have been, for the urban notables, an
unrelated m atter. The seigneurial regim e was seen as part o f a structure o f
local pow er; it w as not, how ever, seen as tied to particular econom ic
strategies— or to any strategies for the rural econom y at alL D oes this
suggest a lim it to the physiocrats’ campaign? Perhaps, but it seem s to follow
from the extent to which the physiocrats w ere m ore concerned with
show ing the irrationalities o f governm ent policy than the m ore diffuse
seigneurial institutions.
Industry, Commerce, Finance

In Table 4.19 w e exam ine the association betw een developm ental concerns
that are not specifically agricultural and fail to find any association with
seigneurial rights. Under the heading o f “ Industry” w e indude proposals
about w eaving or spinning, about m etallurgy, about governm ental controls
and governm ental prom otion, about the state-licensed enterprises for the
production o f luxury goods such as tapestries or porcelain, about coaL We
have excluded dem ands dealing with the guilds, since the absence o f a
relationship has already been docum ented. Under “ Finance” w e include
discussions o f banks and banking, o f credit instrum ents (such as the lettre de
change), of interest loans (and usury), o f state annuities (rentes perpétuelles
and rentes viagères), and o f financiers. Under “ Com m erce” w e indude such
Ih b le 4 .1 8 . D ifferences in Discussions o f Seigneurial

Regime A ssociated with Discussions o f Nonseigneurial
A spects o f Land Tenure in Third Estate Cahiers
Seigneurial Rights a Percentage o f AH
D iscussed Grievances
3.4*** 1.1% *
*p< .05(1 tailed t-test).

***P < .001 (1 tailed t-test).
52. We exclude explicitly seigneurial matters here such as seigneurial fora» of property.
53. The critique of communal rights was also part of the physiocrats' project See Weulersse,
Mouvementpkysiocratiçue, 1:406-19.
m atters as toils545and custom s duties; governm ent controls and governm ent
prom otion o f w holesale com m erce, fairs, m arkets“ and m erchants, colonial
trade, com m ercial treaties, and discussions o f obstacles to free circulation
o f m erchandise within France.
It is striking that these m atters seem altogether unrelated to the seigneur
ial system . In J. Q . C. M ackrell’s The Attack on Feudalism m Eighteenth-
Century France, there is an extended argum ent to the effect that the
econom ic theorists o f the tim e, in effect, (^legitim ated the social structure
o f rural France by proposing a concept o f a m odem state and society m
which seigneurial rights could no longer be justified. M ackrell pays particular
attention to the barriers to noble com m ercial activity. That the status o f
noble could be lost through participation in dem eaning endeavors, it w as
held, seriously inhibited the vitality o f the French econom y. First o f all,
som e w ealthy and talented nobles w ere barred from bringing their resou rces
to bear on econom ically fruitful activities. Perhaps m ore im portant, the legal
principle o f dérogeance helped to define certain activities as dem eaning
and thereby discouraged w ell-to-do com m oners (as w ell as n obles) from
Ik b le 4 .1 9 . D ifferences in Discussions o f Seigneurial Regime A ssociated with Concern

with Industry, Finance, or Com m erce in Third Estate Cahiers
Discussion o f Industry, Seigneurial Rights a Percentage o f All
Com m erce, or Finance D iscussed Grievances
Any grievances concerning

industry* 0.4 -0 .7 %
Any grievances concerning
finance 1.8** -0 .7
Com m erce: freedom o f grain
trade 1.0 -0 .1
Com m erce: any demand dealing
with freedom o f com m erce 1.1* -0 .5
Com m erce: demands dealing
with loss o f noble status
(dérogeance) for com m ercial
activities 0.7 -1 .3
Any three (or m ore) grievances
dealing with com m erce 2.0* -0 .2
Private property 0.7 -0 .6
*ExdudesguUs.
*p< .05 (1 taied t-test).
**p< .01 (1 tided t-test).
54. But not seigneurial tote (so as not to inflate the rehtionahip mialradmgty).
55. But not seigneurial rights over fairs and markets.
continuing to engage in them .56 But w hether or not dérogeance w as a

significant com ponent o f the pattern o f low -risk but high-prestige investm ent
that G eorge Taylor has identified as central to the Old R egim e,575 8w e see
absolutely no sign in Table 4.19 that the authors o f the cahiers held it, even
im plicitly, to have any relation to the seigneurial regim e w hatsoever.
M ackrell is far from the first to have asserted that the requirem ents o f a
new econom ic order contributed to the critique o f feudalism . M ost fam ously,
M arx w rote: “ We see then: The m eans o f production and o f exchange on
w hose foundation the bourgeoisie built itself up, w ere generated in feudal
society. A t a certain stage in the developm ent o f these m eans o f production
and o f exchange, the conditions under which feudal society produced and
exchanged, the feudal organisation o f agriculture and manufacturing indus
try, in one w ord, the feudal relations o f property becam e no longer
com patible with the already developed productive forces; they becam e so
many fetters. T hey had to be burst asunder; they w ere burst asunder.” 55
The m ost forcefu l recen t exponent o f this view o f the Revolution has been
A lbert Soboul: “ The French Revolution took ‘the truly revolutionary w ay'
from feudalism to capitalism . B y wiping out every surviving feudal relic, by
setting the peasant free from every seigneurial right and church tithe— and
to a certain extent from m ost communal dues— by destroying corporative
m onopolies and unifying trade on a national basis, the French Revolution
m arked a decisive stage in the developm ent o f capitalism . The suppression
of feudal estates set free small direct producers. . . . H enceforth, with the
entirely new relations o f production, capital w as rem oved from the stresses
and strains o f feudalism . . . [w hich] finally ensured the autonom y o f
capitalist production both in the agricultural and in the industrial sectors.
. . . The agrarian question occupies a crucial position in the bourgeois revo
lution.”59
A t least one eighteenth-century com m entator, the law yer and revolution
ary Bam ave, expounded a view which has som e striking resem blances to
this position. For Bam ave, European feudalism was intim ately linked to the
dom inance o f landed property. The irretrievably opposed claim s o f com m er
cial and industrial property have tim e and again, in his view , fueled risings
56. The Third Estate of Lyon, for example, wishes to encourage commercial activity by making
it more honorable, proposing ennoblement for merchants distinguished by their “probity andworth”;
that those who follow their fathers into commerce be honored; that the merchant marine be a
career route into the royal navy and that commercial activity not remove someone from the nobility
CAP3:613).
57. George V. Taylor, "Noncapitalist Wealthandthe Origins of the French Revolution,"American
HistoricalReview 72 (1967): 469-96.
58. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, “Manifesto of the Communist Party,” in Selected Works
(Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1955), 1:39.
59. Albert Soboul, The French Revolution, 1787-1799. From the Storming of the Bastille to
Napoleon (New York: Vintage Books, 1975), 8.
against aristocratic rule: in the challenge o f the m edieval urban com m unes
to the territorial lords, in the Reform ation’s defiance o f the pope, and m ost
recently, in the political revolutions o f m odem Europe, first in England and
currently in France. If the physiocratic critique o f the seigneurial regim e
was structured around an inefficient and blocked agriculture, for Bam ave
what was central to the Revolution in which he was a m ost prom inent
participant, was the assertion o f new form s o f wealth against agriculture.60
O ther individual observers, m ay, like Bam ave, have held som e such
view . We see, how ever, that in the spring o f 1789, the Third E state, while
com m enting frequently on the seigneurial regim e and strongly concerned
for the French econom y, d oes not, on the w hole seem to have connected
the tw o in any general way. The form ulation, central to contem porary
historical debate, o f a new econom ic order forcing the displacem ent o f an
older social structure was not a universally held part o f the outlook o f the
urban notables at the outbreak o f the Revolution. Not are discussions o f
private property associated with the seigneurial regim e. If the physiocrats
w ere unhappy about privileges that clouded the claim s o f an individual to
ow n a parcel o f land,61 there is no connection betw een the tw o con cepts in
the cahiers. In short, the econom ic institutions o f a developing capitalism
and the structures o f dom ination o f rural France did not, in general, enter
into the sam e fram ew ork at the outbreak o f the Revolution.
Further Explorations
In light o f all that has been said on this subject from Bam ave to the current
day, the com plete and consistent rejection o f any relationship show n in
Tables 4.17 and 4 .1 9 is startling. Is it perhaps m isleading? Certainly one can
find cahiers that exhibit explicit econom ic rationales for their positions on
seigneurial rights. The peasants o f M olitard in the bailliage o f B lois,
for exam ple, oppose the champart because it im poverishes the land and
discourages agriculture,62 a reasonable com plaint about the paym ent o f a
portion o f the crop .63 O r consider the Third Estate o f H ennebont w hose
60. Antoine-Pierre-Marie Bamave, ftnoer, Property and History: Bamaoe's Introduction to the
French Revolution and Other Writings (New York: Harper and Row, 1971).
61. Weulersse, Mouvementpkysiocratique, 2:3-4; Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, The Origins ofPhysi
ocracy: Economic Revolution and Social Order in Eighteenth-Century France (Ithaca: Cornel
62. Frédéric Lesueur andAlfred Cauchie, Cahiers de doléances du bailliage deBlois etdu bailliage
secondaire de Rmonmtm pour les états généraux de 1789 (Blois: Imprimerie Emmanuel Rivière,
1907), 1:369.
63. Payment of a fixed portion of the harvest may drasticaly cut into profit margins or even
exceed them (a critique that infuses the physiocrats’ call for taxation on the “net product”). There
are abo serious collection costs. Finally, the formal embodiment of rights to such revenues inedicts
andjudicial decisions that specify daims on particular portions of particularcrops, creates a powerful
proposal for restricting mutation fees to certain kinds o f transactions (at,

m oreover, a reduced rate) is put forw ard with the avow ed aim o f facilitating
the sale o f property.64
T h ere are, indeed, many such argum ents in the cahiers. But if the authors
o f the cahiers de doléances explicitly relate the seigneurial regim e to their
econom ic concern s, why don’t the tables that w e have exam ined show a co
occurrence o f grievances? L et us look m ore closely at the tw o docum ents
ju st cited. The peasant o f M ditard argue that the champart injures French
agriculture and the notables o f H ennebont contend that mutation fees hinder
the operation of the m arket; but neither these peasants nor those urban
notables claim that the seigneurial regim e, taken as a w hole, is an obstacle
to econom ic advance. Could it be that although the seigneurial regim e as a
w hole d oes not seem to com e up for discussion to any m arked degree in
cahiers m arked by developm ental concern s, nevertheless, there are particu
lar seigneurial rights that are m ost definitely seen as econom ically critical
institutions? Tables 4.20 and 4.21 show this indeed to be very m uch the
case. In these tables w e take the sam e variables that entered into Tables
4.17 and 4.19. Instead o f exploring the mean differences in extensiveness
and salience o f discussions o f seigneurial rights, w e cross-tabulate these
variables with the presence or absence o f discussions o f particular seigneur
ial rights. O f the large num ber o f possible coefficien ts available to sum m arize
the strength o f associations in such cross-tabulations, I present Goodm an
and Kruskal’s gamma.
In examining the tables w e are at on ce struck by how often hunting
rights, pigeon-raising and rabbit-raising are associated with concerns for
agriculture. A link with protective m easures is transparently obvious, but
the link to concern w ith m ethods o f working the land and with the develop
m ent o f new land (as w ell as with proposals to free com m erce fro n
restrictions) show that there is som e m ore abstract sense o f agricultural
productivity at w ork here. N ote that the lord’s right to am use him self by
constructing and stocking fishponds, far less destructive o f agriculture,
sim ply has none o f the sam e associations for the Third E state in 1789,
although it is a com m onplace for historians’ discussions to group it with the
other recreational privileges.
The only other right so frequently highly associated with the state of
French agriculture is the right to dues on property transfers, w hich, as the
notables o f H ennebont ju st rem inded us, w ere a striking interference with
group of revenue-collectors with a strong interest in blocking the introduction of new crops on
which their daims are legally uncertain. See Gabriel Aidant, Théorie sociologique de (impôt (Paris:
Service d’Edition et de \fente des Publications de l’Education Nationale, 1965), 1:207-15, 407-12.
64. P. Thomas-Lacroix, Les cahiers de doléances de la sénéchausée dlknnebont (Extrait de
Mémoires de laSociété (THistoirtet (fArchéologie deBretagne, voL 25 (Rennes: Imprimerie Bretonne,
1955), 89.
the m arket Like the recreational privileges, this righ t too, is prone to be
treated by cahiers concerned with freedom o f com m erce as w ell. A s for
the other large associations in these tables, m ost are with rights th at to
one degree or another, constitute m arket hindrances. T he m onopoly o f the
w inepress, quite understandably a concern o f those cahiers concerned with
w ine-grow ing, is also im portant to those proposing subsidies for agricultural
developm ent; the m onopoly on milling is rather reasonably associated with
the freedom o f the grain trade. Retrait, like mutation fees, disrupts land
sales and has its share o f associations (although w e find the particular
associations baffling). In fact, six o f our eight agricultural categories are
associated with either the dues on property transfers or retrait or both.
Com pulsory labor services, rights over fairs and m arkets, and seigneurial
tolls account for several other o f the associations here.
M ost o f the associations in Table 4.20 are either organized around the
ravages o f the lord 's am usem ents or the hindrances to the m arket But
there are a few others. Champart, as the country people o f M olitard pointed
out, stood out am ong periodic dues for its restraint o f production and is the
only such paym ent to have any large associations with agriculture. W hat w e
are, perhaps, surprised by is that it is not m ore frequently tied to develop
m ental concern s. If the reasons that champart is linked to protective
m easures in particular are m ysterious, that the lord 's m onopoly on arm s is
so linked is far less so. T he disarm ed peasantry was rendered helpless
against gam e and against the lord’s ow n rabbits and pigeons. (M ight the
lord 's claim to a portion o f the crop be experienced as a form o f parasitism
alongside other form s— the lord 's rabbits and pigeons, livestock disease,
w olves, and partridges— that threatened the fruits o f peasant labor?)
In sum , particular seigneurial rights are linked to econom ic concern s. Yet
these connections are weak. T hey are not generalized to the aggregate o f
seigneurial rights as a collectivity, to recall our discussion above. And there
is not a single significant association in Tables 4.20 and 4.21 betw een any o f
our fourteen categories and general discussions o f the seigneurial regim e.
We do not see, then, that the Third E state had em braced an elaborated
developm entalist ideology in which the regim e was grasped as a w hole and
taken as a barrier to progress.
But there are other lim itations to the w ays in which the seigneurial rights
are tied to developm ental concerns. Property-transfer dues apart, the m ost
consistent associations are with the recreational privileges, which account
for one-third o f all the associations in this table. T here is a heavy em phasis,
then, on the direct physical destruction o f crops at the hands o f the lords
and their servitors. The restrictions on the m arket (again excepting m utation
fees) are far less frequently im plicated by developm ental thinking. And
champart, so clear an obstacle to grow th for contem porary econom ic
historians and the peasants o f M olitard alike, has only one significant
I. Measures of Association (Gamma) Between Third Estate Discussions o f Individual Seigneurial Rights and the Development of
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association. The people o f McÆtard are not typical o f the countryside at that
m om ent. In short, the pattern o f linkages o f seigneurial rights and broad
econom ic concerns show s a lim ited vision and is only d ear in visible collisions
o f animals and grain; it d oes not (y et?) extend to m ore abstract dash es o f
legal structures and investm ent
In this sam e vein, note that a central concept o f the capitalist econom y in
the making, private property, is alm ost untainted by any relationship (posi
tive or negative) with discussions o f seigneurial rights. This w as, w e
su gg est because this sacred catchw ord was serviceable not m erely as a
justification for elim inating the old order, but as a justification for barring its
elim ination as welL Recall the frequency with which property is invoked by
noble defenders o f their prerogatives (see Chapter 2, p. 34). We are likely
to associate the m odem idea o f property with the physiocrats’ defen se o f it,
with their attem pt to con ceive o f an absolute property, unburdened by other
claim s than the will o f an ow ner.65 The cahier Dupont w rote for the Third
E state o f Nem ours has som ething o f this spirit: MFor there is som ething
beautiful, noble and pleasing in the status o f landowner, above all in the
status o f landowner o f the Third E sta te.. . . This class o f citizens has not a
single concern which opposes those o f their fellow citizens. The better they
pursue their ow n affairs, the m ore food is created, and raw m aterials, goods
and riches for all m en, prosperity for the country and pow er for the state”
(AP 4:197). Yes, he goes on, seigneurial revenue is property, too. But the
pow er to vex another and to trouble his labor cannot be anyone’s property
(AP 4:197). On these grounds, then, seigneurial dues m ust be subject to
indem nification.
Now consider the nobles o f Saintonge. T hey, like the Third E state o f
N em ours, uphold the claim s o f liberty and o f property w ith the greatest
determ ination. T heir cahier begins by forcefully forbidding their deputies to
agree to any taxes, borrow ing, or spending w hatsoever without obtaining a
series o f laws, the very first o f which would “assure our personal liberty and
our properties.” T hey g o on to explain that “ as for the significance o f the
w ord property, the order o f the nobility understands it to m ean all m obile
and im m obile possession s o f each individual, notably all rights inherent in
fiefs, such as the right to hunt (excep t in prohibited tim es), the right to fish,
the m onopolies, the labor dues, pigeon and rabbit-raising, mutation fees,
cens, regular cash paym ents, champarts, retraits, infeudated tithes: in short
all property, w hether real or fictive, for which a claim may be justified either
by inheritance or by titles, or by possession, or finally by legal disposition”
(AP 5:665). No w onder those w ho speak o f private property w ere no m ore
nor less likely than others to discuss the seigneurial regim e. This use o f
65. For an interesting recent exposition, see Fox-Genovese, Origins of Physiocracy, 200-201,
228.
“property” as the standard under which m arched both opponents and

defenders o f the seigneurial regim e cam e to be an im portant elem ent o f the
legislative debates (see Chapter 9, p. 531).
If, then, som e developm ental concerns w ere tied to specific seigneurial
rights, this w as not yet the vision o f the feudal shackles to be broken. T he
outlook o f Bam ave (w ritten down in 1792 or 1793) has a coherence that is
only partly in place for the urban notables o f 1789. W hy, then, w ere the
seigneurial regim e and the n ecessities o f econom ic progress not m ore
forcefully, consistently, and generally seen as part o f a single discussion at
the outbreak o f the Revolution? It has, after all, seem ed to many scholars
that a m odern econom y is necessarily antithetical to feudal anachronism s.
But lords in the eighteenth century w ere often able to use their seigneurial
rights as the very vehicles for m odernization. If, on the one hand, retrait,
say, interfered with the m arket in land, it was also a central m echanism in
the lord’s drive to expand and consolidate his holdings to take advantage o f
com m ercial opportunity. A stricter enforcem ent o f seigneurial dues could be
a m echanism to break the rural com m unity. Saint Jacob has show n in
practice how the sam e concerns that undergirded the thought o f the
physiocrats, prom oted an intensification o f the seigneurial system in Bur
gundy.“ The very concept o f private property w as appropriated by those
defending the past as w ell as by those advancing into the future; indeed,
nobles, m ore than urban notables, invoke property rights (se e Chapter 2,
p. 34).
T he notion that the seigneurial regim e, as it existed in 1789, w as
unambiguously and totally irreconcilable with capitalist econom ic practice
was vigorously challenged by G eorges L efebvre. The scrupulous (and
thoroughly bourgeois) patterns o f estate managem ent o f noble lords has
been docum ented in detail by R obert F orster; the degree to which the
conceptual apparatus with which the lord 's legal advisers defended the
claim s w as already using the language o f property and contract has been
shown by Régine Robin. Considered as an aggregate o f individual claim s,
seigneurial rights could be instrum ents o f econom ic change as w ell as
obstacles. If those com m itted to believe them selves in the forefront o f
human advance w ere to identify "feudalism ” with the retrograde institutions
to be elim inated, that feudalism could not be coextensive with the rights o f
the lords. T here m ight be a narrow concept, a subset o f the seigneurial
rights that would be held to exhaust a category o f “ feudal rights” to be
rigorously defined; there might be a broader con cept, grouping som e o f the
seigneurial rights and much else besides as constituting what needed to be
destroyed in order to liberate France. But "feudal and seigneurial rights,” a
generic term in so many Third E state cahiers in the spring o f 1789, would 6
66. Saint Jacob, fígsans d* la Bourgogne du Nord, cap. 405-34.

have to cease being used as virtually synonym ous. U nder the trem endous
pressures o f the Revolution, both a narrow er and a broader notion o f
“ feudalism ” w ere eventually forged .67 W hat was grouped togeth er in the
discussion o f “ feudalism ” on August 4 had been partly, but only partly,
brought together in the cahiers o f the spring.
Honor and Income: The Two Seigneurial

Regimes of the Nobility
Two Kinds of Rights
B y w ay o f contrast let us consider the cahiers o f the nobility. To exam ine
the w eb o f associations o f the seigneurial regim e in the texts o f the nobility
is to do som ething quite different than m erely to parallel this chapter’s
earlier analyses. That analytic strategy rested on the degree to which the
Third E state im plicitly conceived o f the seigneurial regim e as having som e
sort o f unity. It then becam e possible to develop som e sim ple quantitative
m easures for the extensiveness with which that unity was discussed and
the salience o f that unity com pared to other subjects. This in turn perm itted
an analysis o f the degree to which the presence or absence o f other subjects
was associated with the extensiveness and salience o f discussions o f the
It would be convenient although it m ight be m onotonous if a sim ilar
strategy w ere a reasonable one for the nobility. This strategy is inappropri
ate, how ever, for the nobles’ seigneurial regim e d oes not exhibit the unity
o f the Third E state’s. For the Third E state, to review Tables 4.1 and 4 .2 ,
cahiers that discuss any particular seigneurial right are, with few exceptions,
prone to discuss others as w ell But for the nobility, as Table 4 .4 show ed,
discussions o f about half the seigneurial rights treated are not associated
w ith discussions o f other rights.
The distinction betw een the honorific and the incom e-producing aspects
o f the seigneurial regim e has appeared so frequently in our earlier analyses,
has been invoked so frequently in the cahiers them selves, and has played
such a large role in the historical literature, that it seem s w orth exploring
w hether these tw o classes o f rights are conceived o f quite independently by
the nobles. Although, as rem arked earlier, many rights have both aspects
to som e d egree, it is not too difficult to classify m ost o f the 21 categories
discussed in 5 or m ore noble cahiers as primarily lucrative (the eighteenth-
67. The points made in this paragraphare elaborated upon in Chapter 9. The relevant references
to Lefebvre, Forster, and Robin are in that chapter’s footnotes.
century euphem ism w as “ useful”) o r prim arily honorific. Anything that

involved a paym ent in cash, kind, or labor to the lord w e classified as
lucrative even if the paym ent w as small as the cens or corvée usually w ere.
An exploration o f the “m iscellaneous” category revealed that these are
usually rather obscure paym ents and not obscure recognitions o f honor and
so this category, too was counted as lucrative. Serfdom and mainmorte are
m ore difficult, since it is not a particular paym ent that is at issue but rather
restrictions on the m obility o f the local labor force. Since this conferred
m aterial advantage, w e counted these here as w ell. H onorific rights, then,
w ere those that (fid not involve such econom ic advantage, even though
hunting and pigeon-raising have culinary consequences. T hree o f our catego
ries w e failed to classify either way. Seigneurial rights in general could only
be classified if w e knew a priori w hether the 34 noble cahiers that explicitly
speak o f these rights as a collectivity have in mind honor or incom e or both.
The tw o categories that deal with seigneurial ju stice w ere also not assigned
to (Hie group or the other because o f the developing debate over the
econom ic value o f the lords’ cou rts.“
Table 4.22 show s how discussions o f particular seigneurial rights are
associated with discussions o f lucrative rights generally and Table 4.23 does
the sam e for the honorific rights. We see in Table 4.22, for exam ple, that
cahiers which take up com pulsory labor services take up tw o m ore from
am ong the other lucrative ligh ts than those which do not, that these make
up a difference o f 1.3% o f all dem ands and that both these differences are
statistically significant D ocum ents dealing with sym bolic deferen ce pat
terns, on the other hand, are only barely m ore likely to take up lucrative
rights than those that do n o t Examining both tables together w e see that
consideration o f an honorific right is rarely associated with greater attention
to those that produce incom e (see the honorific group in Table 4 .2 2 );
consideration o f a lucrative right is rarely associated with greater attention
to honor (see the lucrative group in Table 4 .2 3 ); w hile consideration o f
rights o f either group are often, although far from always, associated with
m ore extensive treatm ent o f and greater salience to rights o f the sam e kind
(see the lucrative group in Table 4.22 and the honorific group in Table 4 .23).
The lucrative and the honorific appear to be fairly distinct categories for
the nobility— at least to the extent to which they are categories at alL W hile
these categories appear to have som e internal coh eren ce, it certainly is less
than the unity the class o f ail seigneurial rights p ossessed for the Third
E state. N or are the tw o groups w holly d isjoin t T he rights to hunt and raise 6
8
68. Olwui Hufton, “Le paysan et la kx en France au XVÜIe siècle,” Annales: Economies,
Soàttts, Civilisations 38 (1983); Peter M. jones, “Parish, Seigneurie and the Community of
Inhabitants in Southern Central France During the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries," Pastand
Present, no. 91 (1981): 90-96; and Chapter 3.
Tfeble 4 .2 2 . D ifferences in Numbers oí Distinct Lucrative Rights A ssociated with

Particular Lucrative Rights, with Particular Honorific Rights, and with Other Rights in
Noble Cakim
Number o f Distinct Lucrative Rights
Seigneurial Lucrative Rights as a Percentage
Rights Discussed o f All Demands
Lucrative*
M iscellaneous right 0.8* 0.6% *
M onopolies in general 0.8* 0.8**
Dues on fairs and markets 1.5 2.0
Com pulsory labor services 2.0*** 1.3*
Periodic dues in general 2.1*** 0.7*
Cens 2.3* 1.6
Champart 2.0** 1.6*
Dues on property transfers (lods
et ventes) 2.2 1.5
Mainmorte 2.1 2.1
Seigneurial tolls 0.6** 0.7**
Honorific
Sym bolic deference patterns in
general 0.1 0.1
Honorific rights -0 .2 -0 .4
Right to bear arms 0.4 0.1
Avowal and enumeration 0.9 0 .6
Fealty and homage 0.1 -0 .2
Hunting rights 0.9* 0.7*
Right to raise pigeons 1.6** 1.0*
Other
Seigneurial regim e in general 0.7* 0.4
Seigneurial courts, m iscellaneous 0.4 0.3
Seigneurial courts in general 0.9** 0.4
The seigneurial right indicated in the left-hand column is excluded from the computations pre
sented here.
*p< .05 (1-taOed t-test).
**p< .01 (1-taOed t-test).
***/>< .001 (1-tafled t-test).
pigeons, honorific in our rough-and-ready classification, are the only such

rights, Table 4.22 show s, to be associated with the lucrative group as w ell.
W ere these additions to the lord’s dinner table experienced as a sort o f
incom e supplem ent? A s for our efforts at identifying the lucrative, note that
the lord 's pow er to com pel use o f his resou rces or to com m and labor cm his
lands or château are equally notew orthy in their honorific a sp ect
The unclassified categories (“ other” in the tables) are also notew orthy.
Ih b le 4 .2 3 . D ifferences in Numbers o f Distinct H onorific Rights A ssociated with

Particular H onorific Rights, with Particular Lucrative Rights, and with Other Rights in
N oble Cahiers
Number o f Distinct Honorific Rights
Seigneurial H onorific Rights as a Percentage
Rights Discussed o f AH Demands
Honorific*
Sym bolic deference patterns in
general
H onorific rights 0.2 0.2
Right to bear arms 0.6** 0.4*
Avowal and enumeration 1.2* 0 .3
Fealty and homage 1.3 0.7**
Hunting rights 0.7*** 0.3*
Right to raise pigeons 1.0** 0.8**
Lucrative
M iscellaneous 0.2 0.1
M onopolies in general 0.7* 0.9*
Dues on fairs and markets 0.4 0.0
Com pulsory labor services 1.2*** 1.0**
Periodic dues in general 0.8 1.2
Cens 0.6 0.2
Champart 0.4 0.0
Mutation fees 0.5 0.0
Mainmorte 0.6 0.2
Seigneurial tolls 0.2 0.3
Other
Regime in general 0.6*** 0.6*
Seigneurial courts, m iscellaneous 0.3 0.4
Seigneurial courts in general 0.6** 0.5*
The seigneurial right indicated in the left-hand column is excluded from the computations pre
sented here.
* p < . 05 (1-tailed t-test).
**p < .01 (1-taOed t-test).
***p < .001 (1-taded t-test).
D iscussions o f the seigneurial regim e in general occu r in cahiers w ith m ore

extensive discussions o f honor, but are not particularly linked to questions
o f incom e. W hen the nobles speak o f the seigneurial regim e as a w hole,
perhaps by using ‘th e seigneurial rights” or som e equivalent as a global
category, the am arete rights they are apt to have in mind concern their
status distinctions and not their pocketbooks.69 “ Seigneurial courts in gen-
69. On the nobles’ distinctive concern for honor, see Chapter 2.

eral” is also associated with the honorific and not the lucrative category.
T he French nobility did not see (or at least publicly claim ed not to see) their
rights o f ju stice as im portantly incom e-producing, thus taking the view o f
som e o f d ie recen t scholars o f this institution.70
That the nobles see som ething like tw o seigneurial regim es w here the
Third E state sees one can be em phasized in a som ewhat different fashion.
Table 4 .2 4 classifies the noble cahiers into those that do or do not have
grievances concerning any o f the lucrative rights and that do or d o not
have grievances concerning any o f the honorific rights. This table again
underscores the role o f honor for the nobility in that rather m ore docum ents
discuss m atters o f honor than incom e (79 vs. 68). W hat is even m ore
striking is that there is little relationship betw een discussing the tw o classes
o f rights at all; the low gamma o f .22 is not significant By w ay o f rather
dram atic con trast the corresponding gamma for the Third E state is .7 0 and
that relationship is significant at the .001 level.71 Q uite clearly, honorific
rights and incom e-producing rights are barely, if at all, spoken o f in the
sam e con text by the French nobility; quite the contrary is the thinking o f
the Third E state. For the Third E state, there is a seigneurial regim e, one
IWo Webs of Association

To explore the institutional associations o f the seigneurial rights for the
nobility, w e m ust proceed in a som ewhat different manner than for the Third
E state. Conceptually, w e should take into account the bifurcated sen se o f
those rights for the nobles; m ethodologically, w e need to be sensitive to a
Thble 4 .2 4 . C o-occurrence o f Lucrative and H onorific Rights in Noble Cakiers
Cahier D iscusses At Least

One Lucrative Right
No ' Yes Total
Cahier discusses at least one No 57 30 87

honorific right Yes 41 38 79
Total 96 68 166
Note: Gamma = .22 (not significant).
70. See, for example, Hufton, "Paysan et loi,” 682.

71. If one objects that the Third Estate’s discussions of lucrative and honorific rights ought not
to be divided into "none” and "one or more” because the frequency of mention is so much greater
than for the nobOity, one might alternately dichotomize both groups of rights at the median number
discussed. By this procedure, such a cross-tabulation produces a gamma of .41; the relationship is
significant at less than the .005 level.
m uch greater scarcity o f noble discussions o f any o f these rights than was
true for the Third E state. We shall proceed by exploring the distinction
betw een docum ents that do or do not have discussions o f any honorific or
lucrative right, rather than, as for the Third E state, exam ine the num bers
o f such rights discussed and the proportions o f such dem ands am ong all
grievances. W hile this runs the m ethodological risks discussed above to the
effect that phenom ena o f real interest may be obscured by the propensity o f
cahiers that are m erely longer to be talking o f all sorts o f subjects, there are
som e safeguards. B y com paring the associations o f honorific as opposed to
lucrative rights and by com paring the presence or absence o f such associa
tions with different dem ands, w e are protected from the possible errors o f
interpretation o f a single association in isolation. W e shall look for such
associations with the institutions that figured in the earlier discussions in
this chapter. Institutions associated with the lucrative but not the honorific
rights are show n in Table 4.25, listed in descending order o f the size o f the
association; Table 4.26 is the equivalent for the honorific rights; and Table
4.27 show s those institutions associated with both classes o f seigneurial
rights (in descending order o f association w ith the honorific). I show only
statistically significant relationships in any o f these tables.
T h ere are few surprises here. T here are som e developm ental concern s
that are related to the seigneurial regim e as was the case for the Third
E state. Q uestions o f industrial production, how ever, are in no w ay tied to
Ih b le 4 .2 5 . Institutions A ssociated Only with Lucrative Rights in

Noble C a ters
Institutions W hose D iscussion in Cahiers Is

Significantly Associated with Discussion of
Any Lucrative Seigneurial Rights
(But Not with H onorific Rights) Association (Gamma)
Torture in judicial procedure .56*

Casuels .51**
Any discussion of communal rights .49***
Taxes on manufactured goods .46**
Guilds .45**
Annates .44**
Any demand concerning industry (other than guilds) .42**
Any demand concerning religion (other than tithe or casuels) .40**
Tithe .34*
Droit ftnsm uation .34*
Any demand to abolish religious institution or practice
(other than tithe or casuels) .32*
Any demand showing hostility to central governm ent .32*
*p < .05.
**p < .01.
< .001.
Ih b le 4 .2 6 . Institutions A ssociated Only with H onorific Rights in Noble Cahiers
Institutions W hose Discussion in

Cahiers Is Significantly Associated with
Discussion oí Any Honorific Seigneurial Rights
(But Not with Lucrative Rights) Association (Gamma)
Rewards for military achievem ent .64***

Titles o f nobility .57**
Private property .37**
Ennoblement .30*
Vote by order in Estates-General .29*
Tax advantages for nobility .28*
Ecclesiastical benefices .26*
V V V
•
Thble 4 .2 7 . Institutions A ssociated with Both Lucrative and H onorffic Rights in N oble
Cahiers
Institutions W hose Discussion

in Cahiers Is Significantly
Associated Both With
Discussion o f Any Lucrative Associations (Gamma)
Seigneurial Rights and
Any H onorific Seigneurial Rights Lucrative Rights Honorific Rights
Any demands concerning military affairs .63** .71***

Four or m ore demands concerning agriculture .53*** .30*
Five or m ore demands concerning military affairs .51** .39**
Franc-fief .50** .52***
IVvo or m ore demands regarding com m erce .48** .29*
Salt tax .42** .33*
Intendants .41* .81***
Taxes on alcoholic beverages .32* .30*
Tax advantages .30* .46**
*p < .05.
**p < .01.
—*p < .001.
the lord’s claim s on h on or thus dem ands concerning both guilds and other
aspects o f m anufacturing are associated only with the incom e-producing
rights, as is “ taxes on m anufactured g ood s.” The droit &insinuation, in
principle a tax on transfers on m ovable property rather than on real
estate, perhaps belongs in this group as weU. Q uestions o f com m erce and
agriculture, chi the other hand, are im plicitly experienced as linked to both
clusters o f seigneurial rights; their linkage to the honorific group is probably
m ore specifically a link to the rights to hunt and to raise pigeons so w idely
excoriated for crop dam age. The contrast betw een the honorable character
o f agrarian activity and the (at best) neutral character o f manufacturing
bears out the standard view o f how the ideology o f nobility evaluated
different arenas o f econom ic enterprise.
Som e o f the visible social distinctions o f the Old Regim e are associated
with the honorific rights. We are not surprised that the nobility understood
these rights as part and parcel o f a hierarchical vision o f society. What is
perhaps m ost w orthy o f note in this regard is the absence o f an association.
Little in the half-year before the E states-G eneral m et was so bitterly
debated as the very structure o f that body. The Parlem ent o f Paris had
generated a political explosion when it pronounced for what w as understood
to be an E states-G eneral organized in the custom ary w ay: nam ely as three
autonom ous bodies. If each order w ere to vote separately, o f cou rse, the
privileged would feel confident in their capacity to dom inate.
This is one o f the handful o f issues over which the noble and Third E state
cahiers w ere m ost sharply polarized;72 and when the E states m et it proved
to b e the im passe that led frustrated deputies to announce them selves to
constitute a new body, the National A ssem bly, thereby self-con sciou sly
abandoning the Old Régim e. What is striking about noble discussions o f the
issue, is that it is the public honor and not the incom es o f the lords that
appear associated for them with this debate. It is as if the sym bolic
distinctions inherent in the division o f representatives o f the T hree E states
gathering at the cen ter o f national pow er— the prescribed differences in
dress and behavior tow ard the king, the cerem onial entrances that clearly
dem arcated three distinct bodies, in short the theatrical aspect o f the
E states-G eneral o f old— are held to be o f a p iece with the local sym bols o f
differential status. But the obvious m aterial consequences o f the voting rule
is not translated into an equally clear link with the m aterial benefits o f the
seigneurial regim e. The absence o f even an im plicit association here is one
o f the strongest indicators o f the seriousness o f the lords’ frequently
repeated claim o f indifference to m aterial but not prestigious distinctions.
Indeed, the entire list o f institutions that are only linked to honor is o f great
in terest The nobles, it appears, can only defend their tax advantages or
their bid for control o f the E states-G eneral as m atters o f honor. T heir public
discourse stays away from coupling their prerogatives with anyone's m aterial
interests, including their ow n.
N ote too that discussions o f “ private property” are, in the n obles' texts,
associated with honorific but not with incom e-bearing rights. It is in the
defen se o f those claim s that are the hardest to con ceive as property, that
the French nobility w as m ost zealous in pressing its argum ents in such
term s. To argue that claim s on periodic paym ents in cash or in kind
72. Shapôo and Markoff, RevolutionaryDemands, chap. 15.

constituted property would be to argue what even the critics o f the

seigneurial regim e m ight readily con cede (as the physiocratic cahier ci the
Third E state o f N em ours, for exam ple, show s dearly; AP 4:197). It w as o f
less m om ent, then, even for those nobles with som e interest in retaining
them , to defend such rights as property, since m uch o f the Third E state
already would have granted the point. It w as precisely the claim s that w ere
least plausible that m ost reliably evoked this defense. In this opportunistic
stretching o f “ property,” did the nobles contribute to vitiating the later
attem pts o f the new governm ent to rem ind the peasants o f the resp ect
ow ed property rights?
Like the Third E state, the nobility w ere prone to w rite o f a variety o f
other paym ents, to church or state, when they w rote o f the seigneurial
regim e. W hile many o f these are associated with the lucrative rights alone,
it is notew orthy that several o f them are associated with the honorific as
w ell Perhaps it is, again, the very concept o f privilege that underlies this
link. Certainly for franc-fief, the m ost strongly associated tax, the very
distinction m ade betw een noble and com m on land is a fundamental prem ise
(xi which that tax rested. We see, too, that the broad category o f “tax
advantages” is even m ore strongly associated with honorific rights than it is
with lucrative on es. The m ore specific “ tax advantages o f nobility” is also
only associated with the lords’ claim s to honor.
Som e o f the very strongest associations with the lords’ honor (and the
lords’ claim s on incom e for that m atter) have nothing to do with taxation at
aO, but are discussions o f military affairs. We see again the intim ate m oral
association in which the m ilitary service o f the lords o f the past or o f the
noble officers o f the present w as an essential justification for privileges. And
if the grow ing central pow er had largely, as Tocqueville held, destroyed the
rationale on which that privilege rested, w e are struck that the very largest
association o f any institution with the honorific rights is the intendants, the
m ost visible agents o f the centralized despotism that had gnawed away at
autonom ous authority.
The Third Estate Considers the

Seigneurial Regime
A lfred Cobban, in his attem pt to debunk the relevance o f feudalism fo r the
understanding o f the Revolution, com m ented: “ W hatever qualifications or
lim itations w e have to introduce, how ever, the close association, alm ost
equal to an identification, betw een the attack on seigneurial rights and the
attack on ‘feudalism ’ m ust rem ain the basic fact on which all discussion o f
the latter m ust centre. If feudalism ’ in 1789 did not mean seigneurial rights,
it m eant nothing.” 73 But if “feudalism ” m eant at least the seigneurial rights,
it d oes not follow that it m eant nothing e lse .74 We have explored the other
institutions that the Third E state closely associated w ith those rights, to
d iscover som ething o f the structure o f the institutions o f the O ld Regim e as
experienced at the beginning o f the Revolution. We have not tried to discern
what they said they m eant by feudalism , but what they m eant in practice,
w hether they said they m eant it or n o t We have glim psed a m om ent in the
elaboration o f a w eb o f associations. O r, rather, several w ebs.
For the upper reaches o f the Third E state, in the spring o f 1789, som e o f
the seigneurial rights w ere quite clearly seen as econom ic nuisances. H ere
in em bryo is the conception o f a past w hose central institutions are so many
barriers to econom ic grow th: w hose obligations fetter an idea o f progress
identified w ith m aterial advance; and in which hindrances to the operation o f
the m arket are the legacies o f darkness. For Bam ave and still later for many
M arxists the sw eeping away o f such a past w as the heart o f the Revolution.
We see this m eaning o f feudalism in the cahiers in em bryo; but only
m em bryo.
We have also seen a partial realization o f the shaky consensus o f August
4, in which "feudalism ” w as taken as the core o f an Old Regim e in which
seigneurial rights and the reign o f privilege w ere o f a p iece, a conception
recently elaborated upon by Jerom e Blum. For Tocqueville, the cen ter o f
the Revolution w as a clearing away o f outw orn privilege no longer justified
by current social responsibilities; the Revolution destroyed rights that had
cast o ff the m oorings o f duty. Indeed, for Tocqueville, the legitim acy o f all
differential claim s to honor had becom e problem atic before the pow er o f the
idea o f dem ocracy. If August 4 was a step tow ard an im age o f the past as
the locu s o f outw orn privilege and o f the seigneurial rights as a constituent
part o f such an im age, then several m onths earlier, the authors o f the
cahiers had taken a step tow ard that step.
We may now suggest the great significance to be found in the association
o f the very lim ited anticlericalism o f the cahiers with the seigneurial regim e—
and the association, indeed, o f discussions o f religion o f w hatever stripe.
This link may represent the pervasiveness o f a view that linked church and
lord as representatives o f a benighted p a st We may refer to this as the
\foltairean identification o f the forces o f reaction. This great and tireless
publicist portrayed a dying w orid o f ignorance, greed, and inhumanity in his
depiction o f the evils o f serfdom in which he was able to bring about a fusion
73. Cobban, SocialInterpretation, 34-35.

74. By August 1789, ‘feudalism” was also used in a narrow as wefl as in the broad way
considered at this point; the narrow way meant something weO short of the entire bundle of
seigneurial rights (see Chapter 9).
o f his anim osity against the feudal past and his ecclesiastical enem ies.75 T he
serf-holding m onasteries o f eastern France becam e the p erfect ta rg et
\foltaire was far from alone, tow ard the end o f the Old Regim e, in identifying
as a single entity the w orst in both seigneurial and ecclesiastical life, an
outlook that seem ed an inexhaustible source o f lurid or learned fantasy.76
This anticlericalism had only lim ited reign in the cahiers, apart from the
critiques o f tithe and casuels; but the association o f religion and the seigneur
ial regim e ran deeper.
The sen se o f rupture is essential to the felt experience o f revolution.
N ow here did the revolutionaries create for them selves this sen se o f disconti
nuity with greater deliberation than in breaking with the calendar o f the
Christian w orld and starting tim e from zero again. But this dram atic gesture
was soon effaced. M ore enduring was the definition o f a past now dead and
gone, a past from which w e are hopelessly separated by revolution. For the
urban notables, the seigneurial regim e was an essential elem ent o f this
rejected w orld. But this lost w orld, which stands as a dead benchm ark by
which w e find superior the living present, w as elaborated upon in m ore than
one w ay. Several o f the m ore influential such im ages are found, not fully
grow n, in the cahiers o f the Third E state. The association o f the seigneurial
regim e and religious institutions and practices looks ahead to the liberal and
secular nineteenth-century rejection o f the ignorant and superstitious p a st
But w e do have yet the full flow ering o f liberal republicanism ; king and
m onarchy (in M arch 1789) are as yet untainted by association w ith the lord.
We see as w ell the germ o f an im age o f the dead w orld o f the past
which, when elaborated in the nineteenth century and beyond becam e an
unparalleled fram e o f referen ce within which the experience o f change could
be assim ilated to a sense o f orderly, if violent, progress. But the association
o f the seigneurial regim e with econom ic backwardness is even farther from
M arxism than its association with religion is from republicanism . Only
aspects o f the seigneurial regim e are so associated. And these associations
are as likely to recall the theories o f agricultural blockage o f the physiocrats
as they are the sen se o f the flow ering o f new form s o f wealth expressed
byB am ave.
And w e have seen, again in em bryo, the seigneurial regim e as part o f that
doom ed w orld o f outw orn privilege that for Tocqueville so eloquently
defined an Old Regim e unable to stand against the m odem dem ocratic tide.
Privileged access to high posts tended to be discussed in the sam e cahiers
that w rote at length o f seigneurial rights; the sam e was true o f the charged
75. Among Us improbably many diatribes, see, for example, his attacks on “des moines
bénédictins devenus chanoines de Saint Claude en Franche Comté,” in Oeuvres computes (Paris:
Garnier Frères, 1879), 28:353-60.
76. TUs is nicely treated by Mackrell, TheAttack m Feudalism, 31-34,119-20.
question o f placing noble and com m on fam ilies mi the sam e tax role. But tax
privileges generally had little connection to seigneurial rights in the cahiers,
nor did noble privilege in access to the courts nor did other elem ents o f
corporate legal distinctiveness.
A t the beginning o f the Revolution the seigneurial rights w ere seen as
part o f several larger structures. T he shape o f these structures would
becom e clearer, and m ore elaborate, as the Revolution w ore mi (see
Chapter 9 ) and as the thoughtful continued, in the nineteenth century, to
define their m odem w orld by referen ce to a revolutionary break. We have
glim psed a m om ent in the assignm ent o f meaning to the seigneurial regim e
by the Third E state. We have exam ined, across three chapters and many
tables, the w ay that the seigneurial regim e appeared to the en ergetic and
educated w ho got their view s to prevail in the assem blies o f the Third
E state and the nobility. We have seen the positions they had developed by
the spring o f 1789, the positions with which they would face the m ounting
rhythm s o f rural re v o lt The Third Estate had an antiseigneurial agenda,
particularly focu sed on barriers to the perfecting o f the m arket T he m ost
distinctive elem ent o f their program w as its stress on indem nification o f the
lords, a proposal that would accom plish many ends: it would, if carried
through, phase out the seigneurial rights with minimal injury to the lords; it
offered the pleasures o f regarding on eself as holding to the reasonable and
enlightened m iddle ground betw een immobiUsm and anarchy; its inherent
com plexities would provide intellectual activity for legal theorists, assure
law yers a significant role in the revolutionary state, and provide endless
clients in endless lawsuits for legal practitioners throughout the kingdom .
B y adjusting the term s o f indem nification one could fine-tune the general
proposal down the line, in light o f political, econom ic, or ideological needs.
Thus indem nification could bring together a broad array ranging from those
w ho would rather keep seigneurial rights but dared not say so to those w ho
would like a radical abolition and dared not say so. If w e may look ahead to
the sum m er, w e shall, perhaps, find a few am ong the Third E state deputies
prepared for som ething avow edly m ore radical and a larger num ber w ho felt
that the initial d ecrees o f the National A ssem bly w ent too far (see Chapter
8, p. 444).
Am ong the nobility, a substantial num ber o f assem blies w ere not prepared
to accept indem nification— let alone uncom pensated abolition— but many
w ere. What is at least as striking, how ever, as the streak o f avow ed noble
conservatism is the propensity tow ard utter silence. M any a noble assem bly
could find nothing it w as prepared to say at all (not in public, at any rate). If
the silence o f som e is one elem ent o f the absence o f an independent noble
discourse, what was said by those w ho spoke was another. M uch o f the
language o f defense o f seigneurial rights accepted the central elem ents o f
the language o f attack. For those nobles not content with the language o f
honor, these rights w ere justified, if at all, as "p rop erty.” N obles w ere
even m ore prone to adhere to “ property” as an ultim ate value than the
Third E state.
Finally, w e saw that seigneurial rights m attered a great deal to the eûtes.
T hey had their coh eren ce for the Third E state assem blies and w ere part o f
larger discussions as w ell A s Third Estate assem blies drafted and debated
their cahiers and elaborated their critiques o f France’s present and their
hopes for its future, their thoughts kept com ing back to seigneurial rights.
A ssem blies that addressed the barriers to econom ic developm ent found that
certain seigneurial rights cam e into their texts; assem blies that took up
issues o f privilege (and in particular their sense o f access to p osts and
careers) found them selves addressing seigneurial rights as w ell; assem blies
that addressed the role o f the church in France likew ise w ere prone to
consider seigneurial rights.
T he nobility, by contrast, took pains to distinguish tw o kinds o f seigneurial
rights, did not connect them with each other (as shown in the lack o f any
tendency for the nobles to discuss them jointly) and, som etim es, held fast
to the one w hile relinquishing the other. The nobles insisted on their honor
but not their incom es, so they said. Yet they did not defend a society
organized around G od-given hierarchies but one created in freely negotiated
contracts. H onor w as defended in the language o f property and con tra ct
And, on the other hand, incom e-bearing rights, if defended, w ere som etim es
defended by an expensive notion o f honor.
Such w ere the public positions o f urban notables and nobles in the spring
o f 1789 as the antiseigneurial m ovem ent o f the countryside w as ju st
beginning to gather steam . I shall show how the deputies at the National
A ssem bly, Legislative A ssem bly, and Convention coped with the insurrec
tions o f late July and beyond. But w e need, first, to turn from the w eb o f
interconnections o f institutions in the agendas and program s o f the elites
early in the revolutionary p rocess, to the ebb and flow oí rural revolt in tim e
and space.
C h apter
5
Forms of Revolt:
T he French Countryside,
1788-1793
A s the Old Regim e collapsed in France, the countryside rose. T h e rural

rebellions took many form s and w ere directed against many targets. A s the
parish assem blies began m eeting to form ulate grievances and elect deputies
to bailliage assem blies the as yet scattered acts o f peasant self-assertion
testified to the potential storm s and form ed a significant part o f the con text
within which the elections took place. B y the tim e the parish deputies m et
with the tow n deputies to adopt a Third E state cahier for the entire bailliage
as noble and clerical assem blies m et nearby, the rural turm oil had reached
new heights.
Dram atic as the spring events w ere, they w ere but a prelude to the
sum m er disturbances ahead. The continuing rural turbulence, both dem on
strating and aggravating the incapacity o f the existing political order, m ade
a m ajor contribution to the sen se o f crisis that led the representatives o f the
Third E state in June to abandon the concept o f the E states-G eneral to which
they had been duly elected , and in an act o f revolutionary self-assertion,
declare them selves the nucleus o f a National A ssem bly. The great w ave o f
rural m obilization that started in the m iddle o f July, together with the
turbulence o f the tow ns, form ed the backdrop to the National A ssem bly's
ringing declarations o f a break with the past and the inauguration o f a new
social order. The announcem ent o f the total destruction o f the "feudal
regim e” o f August 11 and the enactm ent o f the D eclaration o f the Rights o f
Man and Citizen o f August 26 are the touchstones. A central goal o f the
revolutionary legislature in that turbulent sum m er was the dem obilization o f
the countryside, a goal that proved elusive for years to com e.
O ver the cou rse o f the next several chapters w e shall track the insurrec
tionary m ovem ents across tim e and space. A t what points in tim e and at
what places w ere country people particularly unruly? And at what tim es and
at what places w as their unruliness directed against seigneurial rights,
directed tow ard subsistence questions, or m anifest in land invasions? We
shall be able to make use o f these variations, particularly the geographic
patterns, to exam ine a w ide variety o f hypotheses about the social roots o f
insurrection. We shall also be able to use these variations, particularly the
tem poral patterns, to explore the dialogue o f peasants and pow er-holders.
In this chapter w e shall chart the m ajor types o f insurrectionary actions;
Chapters 6 and 7 will exam ine their tem poral rhythm s and spatial patterning.
But w e m ust first consider the sou rces to be utilized.
In exploring the w ays in which rural insurrection and revolutionary
legislation shaped (Hie another, w e may say that (Hi the legislative side the
relevant evidence is relatively unproblem atic. We have the laws enacted, w e
have prelim inary reports o f the relevant legislative com m ittees, w e have
debates (Hi the floor o f the legislatures, and w e have a good num ber o f
letters and m em oirs o f the legislators to ponder. On the peasant side,
how ever, w e do not have anything close to an enum eration o f the tim e,
place, and nature o f rural actions on a national scale. T h ere are excellent
and invaluable m onographic studies o f particular regions, particular form s o f
conflict and particular tim e p eriods,1 but nothing that approxim ated what I
was after. The archival exploration o f rural conflict on a nationwide scale
from 1661 to spring 1789 carried out by a team directed by Jean N icolas and
1. For a few instances amongmany, see JeanBoutier, Campagnesen émoi: Révoltes etRévolution
en bas-Limousin, 1789-1800 OIYeignac Editions "Les Monédières, 1987); Jean-Jacques Clère, Les
paysans de la Haute-Marne et la Révolution française: Recherches sur les structures foncières de
la communauté villageoise (1780-1815) (Paris: Editions du Comité des Travaux Historiques et
Scientifiques, 1988); Hubert C. Johnson, The Midi in Revolution: A Study of Regional IbUtical
Diversity, 1789-1793 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986); Michel Vbvefle, “Les cam
pagnes à l’assaut des villes sous la révolution,” in Michel \foveDe, ed., Ville et campagne au 18e
siècle: Chartres et la Beauce (Paris: Editions Sociales, 1980), 227-76; Anatoly V. Ado, Krestianskoe
divizhenie vo Frantsü vo premia velihoi burzhuaenoi revoliutsii hontsaXVIII veha (Moscow: IzdateT-
stvo Moekovskovo Universiteta, 1971).
T he F rench C ountryside , 1 7 8 8 -1 7 9 3 205
G uy Lemarchand2 was an inspiring but also daunting m od el I opted for the

relatively lim ited task o f attem pting to assem ble as com plete a set o f data as
could be done from already published accounts. Such a data set carries with
it the lim itations and the biases im posed by the selective interests o f
historians o f France; on the other hand, it also has the considerable virtue
o f being a far m ore m odest undertaking than the m ultiyear transatlantic
archival search to be carried out by a research team requiring training
and supervision.
Defining an Event
B y an “ even t,” I meant an instance o f tw enty or m ore people o f the
countryside, acting publicly and as a group, directly engaged in seizing or
dam aging the resou rces o f another party or defending them selves against
another party’s claim s upon them . I required, m oreover, that if there w as a
party that could clearly be regarded as the initiator o f the event (and there
m ight not b e) and if there w ere any clearly defined leadership roles (and
there m ight not b e) those roles m ust be filled by local people for the party
that initiates the ev en t Finally, tw o narratives w ere taken to describe the
sam e incident if they took place in the sam e location within an interval o f
tw enty-four hours and did not differ in the participating groups. (Thus tw o
accounts, drawn from separate sou rces, o f “ peasants” stopping a grain
con voy in the sam e parish one day apart w ere regarded as aspects o f a
single e v e n t)3
Such a definition is designed in the first place to provide guidelines so as
to delim it the range o f events to enter into one’s data s e t B y being explicit
about ju st what one intends to cou n t one m akes clear the sorts o f things
not counted (w hich is not always clear when one w orks with heterogeneous
com pilations produced by others— in the form s o f official statistics o f one
sort or another, say.) T he point o f this particular definition is not to
approxim ate som e theoretically ideal notion o f conflict, but rather to delim it
a subset o f aO conceivable conflictual events that one m ight hope to count in
2. See Nicolas, "Lea émotions dans l’ordinateur premiers résultats d’une enquête collective,”
paper presented at the University of Paris VH, October 1986, and Lemarchand, “TVoubles
populaires au XVIIIe siècle et conscience de dasse: Une préface à la Révolution française,"Amula
Historiques de la Révolution Française, no. 279 (1990): 32-48. This research is discussed later in
this chapter and also in Chapter 6.
3. This worldng definition of a codable event, IQcethose used by other recent researchers, is a
variant of Tilly’s. See, for example, Charles Tilly, “Contentious Repertoires in Great Britain,
1758-1834,” SocialScience History 17 (1993): 270-71.
a reasonably uniform way, given the sou rces to be used. B y excluding

even ts below a certain size, one hopes to om it events so small that their
m ention should be taken as haphazard; by insisting on public and collective
even ts, one hopes to avoid including such stray instances o f furtive and
individual acts that happen, in a very unrepresentative fashion, to have
caught the n otice o f som e w orthy chronicler. Opting for direct claim s upon
or dam age to another's resou rces includes such things as peasant seizures
erf land but excludes peasant petitions for land; it also includes peasants’
slaughter o f the lord’s animals, but excludes peasant petitions calling for an
end to the m onopolistic right to raise animals. Including actions taken in light
o f threats against one’s ow n resou rces includes the G reat Fear and lesser
incidents o f rural panic, even when the feared party was largely imaginary.
Excluding actions in which an initiating party acts under extra-local leader
ship excludes actions in which agents acting on behalf o f the governm ent
attem pt to arrest or attack peasants (but d oes not exclude actions in which
peasants attack police in order to rescu e a fellow w ho has fallen into their
clutches); it also excludes many o f the events o f the civil w arfare o f the
w estern counterrevolution,4 but not the incidents that led up to its outbreak
(provided those incidents w ere initiated by country p eople). T he restriction
to incidents involving country people as actors w as o f a different character;
it was not dictated by the hope o f avoiding incidents w hose inclusion would
be com pletely haphazard, but by the nature o f m y research interests and
the finitude o f resou rces (especially tim e).
Now these various conditions and distinctions d o not always com e neatly
packaged in available accounts. H ow ever desirable a uniform threshold (“ at
least tw enty people” ) m ight be, precise inform ation about size is often,
indeed generally, not p resen t E very one o f the distinctions pointed to
above, th erefore, dem anded som e rough-and-ready rules o f thumb, if they
w ere actually to be applied. An event was regarded as involving rural people
as actors, for exam ple, if (a) it took place in the countryside and there was
no explicit claim that the actors w ere tow nspeople (so that all attacks on
rural châteaux w ere counted); or (b) it took place in a tow n but the source
explicitly indicated significant rural participation (as in many, but far from all,
m arket disturbances). (Instances in which tow nsfolk ransacked nearby
farm steads looking for grain, how ever, w ere exclu ded.) To take another
exam ple, an event was regarded as having tw enty people if either (a) there
w as an explicit num ber o f the proper magnitude given, (b ) som e other
appropriate indicator o f magnitude was present (such as adjectives like
4. Although the largest group of such excluded events are part of the counterrevolution in the
West, concentrated from March 1793 on, another important although smaller cluster arise from the
various attempts to organize and coordinate large-scale counterrevolutionary activity in the South,
particularly in the départements of Gard, Ardèche, and Hérault from the summer of 1790 into 1792.
T he F rench C ountryside, 1788-1793 207
“ enorm ous,” "la rg e,” “ many” )» or (c) there w ere indications that the
participants cam e from m ore than one parish and there was no explicit
statem ent that few er than tw enty people w ere involved.
Temporal Boundaries
I w anted as tem poral boundaries a period long enough for there to have
been many significant alterations in the national political con text within
which country people acted— but not so long that data collection would be
interm inable. I opted to begin with the sum m er o f 1788 when the political
crisis betw een the m onarchy and the sovereign courts cam e to a head in the
desperate attem pt to abolish the courts in M ay, an event soon follow ed by a
call for a nationwide p rocess o f research, reflection, and advice on the rules
to be follow ed in convening the first E states-G eneral in 175 years. I took as
an endpoint the flurry o f laws on land purchase, division o f the com m ons,
and seigneurial rights that the radicalized Convention enacted in the imm edi
ate wake o f the Parisian insurrections o f M ay 31 and June 2, 1793, that
drove the Girondins from the legislature. (F or precise dates I selected June
1, 1788, through June 30, 1793.)
Sources
The ch oice o f sou rces in such research, like the ch oice o f definitions, is a
com prom ise betw een an ideal and the constraints o f finite resou rces. Initially
hoping for a relatively speedy although still acceptable substitute for an
archival search on a vast scale, I turned to the extensive docum entation o f
rural insurrection in Anatoly A do’s dissertation Kresfianskoe dvizhenie (“ T he
peasant m ovem ent in France during the great bourgeois revolution o f the
late eighteenth century” ). A do’s am bitious w ork attem pted to survey in
som e detail “ the peasant m ovem ent” as a w hole, by synthesizing the
research o f historians as w ell as exploring adm inistrative correspondence,
reports o f com m ittees o f the revolutionary legislatures, letters from local
governm ent officials, and petitions. Sources in the National A rchives w ere
explored and som e departm ental archives looked into (particularly through
printed inventories). A do m akes no claim to having achieved com pleteness;
although this w ork is the closest thing there is to an attem pt at a com prehen
sive enum eration, A do m akes clear that his intentions have certain clear
boundaries (1 6 -1 7 , 77). He does not cover the fam ous rural panic (the
G reat Fear) o f the sum m er o f 1789 in any detail because G eorges L efebvre’s
m agnificent book already has done the job . (W ere this the only lacuna, one
could sim ply supplem ent A do with L efebvre.) Additionally, how ever, A do
inform s us that he is not interested in the counterrevolution (16); that is left
for som e other scholar. Finally, A do’s account o f many incidents is too
sketchy for m y purposes.
A do’s survey, then, could only be taken as the starting point.5 One m ust
search further in the historical literature, or still face the daunting prospect
o f a m ajor search through the archives. G iven the vast literature (Hi the
Revolution, how could this search for relevant scholarship be narrow ed? To
read through everything w ritten on the Revolution in the countryside in
order to find accounts o f rural conflict, after all, would not only have the
frustrations o f a vast “ dross rate”6 but would very likely take (Hi the
dim ensions o f the national archival search that 1 was hoping to avoid in
the first place. I adopted, therefore, the follow ing rules for exploring the
literature so as to com plete A do’s survey:
1. For the G reat Fear, I w ent back to L efebvre’s classic account,7

supplem ented by a search for tw o categories o f literature: (a) anything
w ritten (Hi the G reat Fear since L efebvre and (b) an exam ination o f
sou rces prior to L efebvre (for which his ow n bibliography w as an
im portant start) when L efebvre’s ow n account seem ed too sketchy.
2. For the conflicts in the w estern departm ents that led up to the great
counterrevolutionary battles o f 1793 and beyond, I searched through
the indefatigable chroniclers o f those events.
3. I explored all titles that I could obtain that w ere published since
A do’s w ork (but before M arch 1991) that seem ed likely to deal with
rural insurrection.8
4. W hen A do’s account w as sketchy, I w ent bade to his sou rces, often
finding m ore detailed accounts than he sum m arized. Som etim es the
m ore detailed account m ade d ear that the incident in question did not
m eet m y criteria for inclusion.
5. The data are provided in the form of maps, narrative accounts, and a supplementary listing
of incidents. I used the first edition of 1971. The more recent secood edition is enriched theoreticaly
by Ado’s situating his study in relation to some erf the important recent research, but this new
edition does not present all the detailed accounts of insurrection that were included in an
appendix in the earlier version. See Anatoly V. Ado, Kresfiane i velikaiafrantsuzskaia revolùUsüa:
Knesfianskoe dvitkenie v 1789-1794 godu (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo Moskovskovo Universiteta, 1987).
6. I appropriate this term from Eugene J. Webb, Donald T. Campbell, Richard Schwartz, and
Lee Sechrest, Unobtrusive Measures: Nonreadive Research m the Social Sciences (Chicago: Rand-
McNaOy, 1966), 32-33.
7. Georges Lefebvre, La Grandefour de 1789 (Paris: Armand Cohn, 1970).
8. The March 1991 cutoff date was simply the point at which I felt it was time to shift from data
colection to tabulation and writing. There is some important new work that has been done since
that date and there wil be more. I explore the implications of this below.
T he F rench C ountryside , 1788-1793 209
W hen I found an incident that did m eet m y criteria fo r inclusion, I

recorded the inform ation about that incident in which I was interested.
W hen it was unclear w hether or not an incident m et m y criteria or when an
appropriate incident w as inadequately described, I attem pted to identify
sou rces that m ight have m ore inform ation (an effort far m ore successful
with larger confrontations than sm aller on es). Ultim ately, som e 110 sou rces
proved to have inform ation on at least (me incident o f conflict that I had not
found elsew here; see the Appendix. (A larger num ber o f potential sou rces
w ere consulted, many o f which had no inform ation that I had not already
found; over tim e this search procedure encountered radically diminishing re
turns.)
Actions, Events, Types of Events

An “ even t" is understood to be com posed o f a set o f “ actions” undertaken
by one o r m ore identifiable groups against one or m ore targets with no
break o f m ore than one day betw een actions. An event, then, has a varying
num ber o f actions. If a group o f villagers breaks into the château, seizes
food, and dem ands that the lord give them som e docum ents, w e have an
even t w ith three actions. Events may be grouped into “ typ es" that seem
analytically useful. In this and the next tw o chapters I shall make consider
able use o f a small num ber o f very broad classifications. Events will be
classed as “ antiseigneurial,” for exam ple, or “ having a religious a s p e ct”
T h ese categories are intended to give a very broad sen se o f the ebb and
flow o f con flict L et it be noted that these broad categories— I use nine in
Table 5.1— are hardly mutually exclusive. First o f all, an event may have
actions o f m ore than one type. (C onsider an event in which peasants first
seize food from the château and then do the sam e at the local m onastery.
Its tw o actions m ade this event both “ antiseigneurial” and “ religiou s.")
Second, an individual action may fall into m ore than one broad grouping:
tearing out the lord’s church bench is in itself both “antiseigneurial” and “ reli
giou s.”
O ne m otive for the detailed cod e that I used, in fact, w as to go beyond
the lim its o f the sim ple and rigid schem e that I had used in previous studies
o f the countryside in the spring and sum m er o f 1789.9 I had originally
classified even ts into one o f six types that it m ost closely fit I felt that m y
initial six categories (antiseigneurial, antichurch, antistate, subsistence,
G reat Fear, other) w ere both too crude to capture som e very significant
9. See, for example, John Markoff, “The Social Geography of Rural Revolt at the Beginning of
the French Revolution,” American SociologicalReview 50 (1985): 761-81.
distinctions (d o they attack specific features o f the seigneurial system , say,

or do they attem pt to destroy the capacity o f the lords to claim any rights?)
and too rigid in insisting that an event could fall into only one category.
I shall enlarge on this latter p oin t An action described in detail m ight fit
in m ore than one place. If a group o f country people invade the lord’s
château and m enacingly insist that he feed them , are w e to see this prim arily
as an invocation o f a norm o f hospitality, now to be m ockingly parodied in
order thereby to represent a w orld in which the lord’s form er dependents
are now the en forcers o f the rules? O r do w e see this essentially as hungry
people seeking food? Is it an “ antiseigneurial” or a “ subsistence” action? Vfe
usually cannot reconstruct the state o f mind o f the participants terribly w ell
but it seem s reasonable to observe that there are no doubt diverse m otives
within the group insisting that the lord feed them , there may w ell have been
a m ature o f m otives within som e (or all) o f the participants and it is, in any
event, m ost im probable that w e can discover the precise m ix in any
particular crow d. N or are the attributions o f m otive by participants and
observers necessarily m ore credible than those o f historians. It is doubtful
that one ought to take a frightened lord’s testim ony or the hastily penned
letter o f a local official as authoritative on such a m atter, even when that
reporter com m ents on m otive. Claims o f rioters in police custody as to their
m otives also need to be taken with many grains o f sa lt Rather than attem pt,
then, to decide w hether to regard such an event as essentially antiseigneurial
or essentially subsistence in character, w e regard it as both .10
O f som e 4,700 incidents (“ events”) identified from the sum m er o f 1788
to the sum m er o f 1793, there was considerable variation in the level o f
detail in which I had som e confidence. Som etim es all I knew was that there
had been som e sort o f clash; at other tim es I may have learned that a group
o f peasants entered the lord’s château but had no idea o f what they did
there; in still other instances I had a very rich accou n t W hile I often knew
the exact day a particular event took place, som etim es the ultim ate source
o f the account (a local official writing to request m ilitary help, say) w as less
precise than th at Som etim es indeed I could date an event only very roughly
(as in an anxious report to the National A ssem bly on food riots over the last
few m onths, for exam ple). In general, the published literature on which I
relied is a great deal clearer about when a conflict com m enced than when it
10. From a methodological point of view, it may be noted that the attempt to insist that our
categories be mutually exclusive ones (that is, that a particular event be either antiseigneurial or
subsistence-oriented but most definitely not both at the same time) would surely have produced
many highly unreliable codings; this discrimination calls for a nuancedjudgment that cannot be made
with any confidence on the basis of available sources. In fact, it is often doubtful if such ajudgment
could be made with any confidence on the basis of any conceivable sources whatsoever. The more
concrete and manifest judgment, namely, that rural people did enter a château anddid indeed coerce
a meal is a coding decision that can be made far more reliably.
T he F rench C ountryside, 1 7 8 8 -1 7 9 3 211
ended, to the d egree, indeed, that I abandoned the attem pt to analyze the
duration o f actions altogether. N or did I find these sou rces at all usable for
the reconstruction o f sequences o f action within a single event: I w as far
m ore likely to get a catalogue o f the various things the invaders did in the
château, m onastery, or tax-office than I was to have any d ear sense o f
the ord er in which they did those things; still less often did I get a d ea r
picture o f the p rocess that brought th an to the château (D id they assem ble
elsew here? Did they com e from church or parish assem bly? Had they been
w orking in the fields or chatting in the tavern? Did they converge individually
before the lord’s dw elling?) or what happened next (D id they disperse to
their hom es? Did they plan another attack?). I often had little but the
vaguest indication o f which elem ents in the rural com m unity partidpated
(W ere they landless laborers, sharecroppers, rural textile-w orkers, small
h olders?) and only quite rarely had any indication o f the gender m akeup o f
the group. I attem pted to record the level o f detail 1 did have concerning the
character o f the event, and in the case o f dates, the approxim ate level o f
precision. Indications o f size w ere generally very vague when they existed
at aO. W hile I was sure a “very large” group was at least tw enty and
therefore fit m y definition, I was often far less sure if tw o hundred or tw o
thousand w as closer to the m ark.11 Far m ore successful, how ever, w as the
discovery o f the targets o f the action: that one gathering storm ed a
m onastery w hile another looted a household’s grain w as generally clear
enough. G iven these lim itations m y analyses m ust focu s on places, dates,
targets, and tactics.
Biases
T he biases o f m y data set are those o f the body o f literature on the French
Revolution as a w h ole.12 Evaluating those biases is a com plex m atter, for
there are many. We shall consider four here.
I . Urban Bias. The historical profession has disproportionately focu sed
on the rural zones around large cities. First o f all, the tow n is likely to have
the resou rces in the form o f archival facilities, funds, and trained personnel
II. It is an interesting symptom of the continuing vitality of corporate images of society that one
fairly frequently finds daims about which parishes had participants in an event If multiple parishes
were involved I always assumed there were at least twenty participants, unless explicitly informed
otherwise.
12. In some ways they do, andin some ways do not, resemble the biases in the use of newspaper
sources for sequences of conflict, a practice reviewed by Roberto Franzosi, “The Press as a Source
of Sodohistorical Data: Issues in the Methodology of Data Collection from Newspapers,” Historical
Methods 20(1987): 5-16.
that facilitate research- Second, and not necessarily less im portant, univer
sity-educated historians are likely to prefer the am enities o f living in a large
tow n while they carry on their research. (I recall Richard C obb observing at
a con feren ce on ce som ething to the effect that Clio may not be any d o se r in
Paris than in the m iddle o f the Auvergne but that everything else w as a
lot clo se r.)
2. Dramatic Bias. Second, one strongly suspects a tendency to publish
m ore w here som ething dram atic happened during the revolutionary years.
If one assum es that such a propensity carries over into the study o f
insurrectionary activities them selves, one is led to the conduskm that it is
likely that regions known to have prom oted dram atic rural clashes have had
those clashes m ore thoroughly researched than such clashes as actually
took place in quieter zones. T he gap betw een regions that appear relatively
peaceful and those that appear relatively turbulent according to the data are
very likely valid but are exaggerations o f reality: the true gap is not so g rea t
W e may be alm ost certain that the sam e m echanism operates in the
tem poral as w ell as the spatial dim ension o f the data s e t A plot o f the total
num ber o f electoral districts involved in insurrections by m onth, for exam
ple, reveals July 1789 to have an enorm ous spike and M arch 1790 a striking
trough (see Chapter 6 ). N o doubt there was such a peak and such a trough,
but the data exaggerate the difference: a historian may spend a lifetim e
studying the July even ts; I doubt if many would care to make a career out o f
the follow ing M arch. The reputation o f July for turbulence attracts arm ies o f
diligent graduate students to the archives in search o f still m ore turbulence
to discover— and discover they have; the very scarcity o f rural disturbances
the follow ing M arch no doubt discourages students o f disorderly politics
from investing too much energy.
3. Size Threshold Bias and the Dilemma of Unorganized Actions. E vents
involving large num ber o f persons, open challenges to som e other party,
and explicit form ulation o f grievances are undoubtedly far better covered
than actions undertaken by a few persons or a solitary individual in the dead
o f night and with no explicit form ulation o f grievance. The crow d that
m arches at noon to the gate o f the château and dem ands that the lord
renounce his rights is far m ore likely to have its deeds enter the historical
literature than a few friends w ho carry out a midnight act o f arson . . . or
the nonconfrontational nonpaym ent o f som e traditional obligation, a m atter
o f the greatest significance. W hile overt resistance to the m ilitary draft in
M arch 1793, for exam ple, w as rare in the département o f C orrèze, draft-
dodging was w idespread and significant.13 Through the years o f revolution
draft evasion w as as significant as— if not m ore significant than— draft
resistance, tax evasion as tax resistance, and so on.
13. Bouder, Campagnes en émoi, 211-19.

N ow this is hardly a unique feature o f this data set but I w ish to consider
this problem at som e length because its im plications are rather serious. It is
the collective and virtually unanimous wisdom o f researchers on conflict
even ts that w hatever sou rces w e are w orking with (new spapers, official
statistics, archives o f one sort or another) understate the occu rren ce o f
sm aller, less dram atic, and less openly confrontational events. It has becom e
a part o f the standard w isdom that one tends to have a m ore valid sam ple to
the extent that one establishes a threshold for the scale o f the event, below
which one d oes not incorporate that event into one’s data s e t 14 Som e o f
this research claim s a theoretical rationale, in happy conjunction with the
lacunae in the data, that downplays the damage done by the m ethodological
problem , indeed, that m akes a virtue o f n ecessity. If one has as one’s
theoretical focu s the interaction o f popular protest and elite action, then
surely it is the form s o f p rotest that are noticed on high that one ought to
stu dy.1S T he small group or individual action, the surreptitious expression
o f rage in the dark o f night, the act o f sabotage that keeps its m otives
hidden— th ese sim ply do not carry the w eightiness o f p rotest that is
collective, disruptive, and that openly and explicitly challenges the prevailing
order. It may be true, as James S cott16 has eloquently argued, that the
norm al form s o f peasant resistance (and o f underclasses m ore generally) are
furtive, individual, anonym ous, and inexplicit. But counterbalancing the
severe, and usually im possible, obstacles to the system atic study o f such
everyday resistance, is their lesser significance in historical p rocesses. It is
the collective, open, and explicit challenge that gets the elite to sit up and
take notice.
To w hatever extent this argum ent genuinely suits other historical situa
tions (as opposed to com fortingly soothing research ers' anxiety over un
avoidable error), it probably d oes not accord terribly w ell w ith the French
Revolutionary period. The m ethodological difficulty is as pertinent as ever,
it is far harder to assess the passive noncom pliance with seigneurial dues
than the château burnings. The theoretical rationale for om itting the study o f
such phenom ena, how ever, is rather weak. The Revolution began with a
severe financial crisis w hose attem pted solution obsessed the leadership in
14. David Snyder and William R. Kelly, “Conflict Intensity, Media Sensitivity and the Validity of
Newspaper Data,"American Sociological Review 42 (1977): 106-21. There is no consensus on the
threshold: Tilly’s French data set, for example, required a minimum of fifty persons, his British
data, 10.
15. For a compelling statement oí this position, see Sidney Tarrow, Democracy and Disorder:
Protest and Pflitics in Italy, 1965-1975 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 9; and “Political
Opportunities, Cycles of Protest and Collective Action: Theoretical Perspectives,” paper presented
at Workshop on Collective Action Events and Cycles of Protest, Cornell University, 1990.
16. James C. Scott, Weapons of the Weak. Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New York:
Vintage Books, 1985).
Paris for years. The m ere nonpaym ent o f taxes, w ithout overt challenge,
w ithout explicit dem ands, w ithout collective gatherings, w as, under these
circum stances, som ething that was very m uch noticed. The sam e applied to
other form s o f nonconfrontatkm al noncom pliance. The central item in the
initial strategy for replenishing the em pty treasury w as to seize and sell land
(o f king and church first o f all, and later o f ém igrés). A significant com ponent
o f the value o f that land w as the various seigneurial rights attached thereto;
and thus the revolutionary regim e, avow edly “ antifeudal" though it pro
claim ed itself to be, found itself attem pting to en force the collection o f
seigneurial rights m “national land" as w ell as enforcing seigneurial pay
m ents elsew here.
But even before the Revolution, the people o f the French countryside had
honed the skills o f hidden noncom pliance with the lords’ dem ands to a fine
a rt A recen t survey o f the difficulties o f collection by G érard Aubin points
up such sim ple d evices as delayed and partial paym ents, which m ight be
m ore trouble for the lord to challenge than to live with; such awkward ones
as avoiding mutation fees by concealing land transfers— frequent enough
that many lords reduced their claim s by one-fourth to one-half to encourage
paym ents rather than concealm ent; and such a subtle one as claim ing (me
didn’t know what one ow ed or even w ho the lord w as, thereby im posing on
lords the burden o f docum enting their lordship before judges w ho in a
rationalistic age m ight want nonexistent docum entary p roof.17 (T his last
technique had the additional virtue o f adding to the peasant reputation for
general ign orance.) In the face o f such practices the lord’s legally defensible
claim s w ere rather larger than his actual revenues; the lord’s claim s w ere,
in effect, the starting point for protracted but tacit negotiation. W ith so
much experience behind them , nonpaym ent surely enlarged w ith Revolution.
But under the Revolution’s straitened financial circum stances, such w ide
spread nonpaym ent was surely noticed.
The French Revolution, I am suggesting, w as a m om ent when the usual
hidden w eapons o f the weak did not go overlooked; they contributed to the
governm ent’s sen se o f what it w as up against in the countryside every
bit as much as the m ore visible, dram atic, collective, and often violent
confrontations. And yet how much harder m easurem ent is. On those rare
m om ents o f overt invasion o f forests, the startled, frightened, and angry
landow ners, police, and judiciary produce w ritten descriptions that w e may
look for. O f those many m om ents when acts o f poaching, illicit tree-felling,
or pilfering o f forest products occurred, only a relatively haphazard selection
17. Gérard Aubin, “La crise du prélèvement seigneurial à la fin de l’Ancien Régime” in Robert
Chagny, e<L, Aux origines provinciales de la involution (Grenoble: Presses Universitaires de
Grenoble, 1990), 23-33. For a survey of similar practices surrounding the tithe, see James C.
Scott, “Resistance without Protest and without Organization: Peasant Opposition to the Islamic
Zakatand the ChristianTithe,” ComparativeStudies in Society andHistory 29 (1987): 417-452.
enters the ken o f the overw orked rural police, the cou rts, and the w orld o f
the adm inistrators.
In the interpretation o f trends in conflict from 1788 to 1793, th erefore, it
will be essential to pay attention to the possibility that even ts excluded for
absolutely sound m ethodological principle, nonetheless play an im portant
role as an alternative form o f conflict and, therefore, afreet our understanding
o f the even ts that are included. The rise and fall o f overt antiseigneurial
violen ce, for exam ple, may be due not m erely to changing perceptions o f
opportunity for collective m obilization and assessm ents o f the probabilities
o f repression, although, o f cou rse, these played critical roles. It may also be
due to shifts am ong form s o f struggle sinne o f which are im possible to track
within the sam e data series. A fall in m easured incidents o f antiseigneurial
con flict may not only indicate either the su ccess o f repression or the
satisfaction o f desires; it may signal a shift to nonconfrontational avoidance
o f paym ent as a preferred tactic.
4. Axe-grinding Bias. Finally, w e need to consider the biases in the
literature that bear on the type o f event represented. B y virtue o f the
concern o f som e historians with locating the revolutionary actions o f the
peasantry, som e, like Anatoly A do, have been m ost diligent in the enum era
tion o f the sort o f “ antifeudal” events w idely held to have been a central key
to what the Revolution is all about; still others, in adm iration or revulsion,
have m eticulously chronicled the conflicts in w estern France that form the
background to the great counterrevolutionary explosions o f 1793; still others
have been fascinated by the subsistence events so crucial to recen t debates
over the relationship o f the rural com m unity to the developing m arket By
w ay o f con trast relatively few historians have paid m uch attention to the
Revolution’s antitax rebellions. The specific scholarly axes being ground
have varied: som e, especially chi the left, have a theoretical axe and w ish to
show up the antifeudal character o f the Revolution or the peasant resistance
to the m arket thereby looking for attacks on châteaux or grain con voys.
O thers o f the left (or right) have historical axes: to show up the barbarous
(or h eroic) actions o f the w estern peasantry confronted with the revolution
ary state.
W hen tabulations reveal the data set to contain relatively few anti-tax
incidents (see Table 5 .1 ), one m ust at on ce p ose three rival hypotheses,
each with its ow n plausibility: (1 ) the country people w ere less profoundly
hostile to taxation than to their other burdens;18 (2 ) nonconfrontational
avoidance o f taxes, possible under the institutional breakdown o f the Revolu
tion, w as a m ore cost-effective tactic than insurrection (sin ce gallow s
or guillotines w ere always possible outcom es); and (3 ) historians have
18. See Chapter 3 for evidence on how frequently taxes were to be reformed, seigneurial rights
and tithes abolished.
system atically M e d to give taxation issues their full significance, by virtue

o f their preoccupation with other form s o f struggle that seem ed m ore to the
point given prevailing interpretations o f the Revolution.
Moving Beyond the Biases of the Sample

G iven the problem atic character o f the evid en ce,19 the only justification for
such an enterprise is the expectation that even a very rough tracing o f the
flow o f insurrection as it unfolds in tim e and across space and as its targets
and tactics change will perm it a fuller appreciation o f the richness o f rural
political action. It should also help fill in an im portant con text for the behavior
o f other parties to revolutionary struggles, particularly the legislatures.
What is fundamental is recognizing first o f all that the aggregate num ber
o f all incidents identified and counted is in no sen se a sam ple from som e
clearly defined universe; and second, that variations in the relative frequen
cies o f different types o f incidents are not nearly so prone to the sorts o f
invalidity I have been discussing. T o enlarge on the first half o f this
statem ent; the difficulty in unambiguously defining the conflicts to be
included; the uncertainty over the recording practices o f the p olice, judges,
annalists, journalists, and historians that one takes for sou rces; the certainty
that as the scop e, intensity, and scale o f conflict grow sm aller the less likely
is a particular event to enter on e's sources com bined with one’s uncertainty
as to the extent o f this size bias at different sizes (d oes it m atter, to d te
num bers actually used in recen t studies, if one sets the threshold at fifty,
tw enty, ten, or fou r?); the difficulties in assessing the relative extent o f bias
in incidents o f different sorts (just how much less likely is an anti-tax
insurrection than an antiseigneurial insurrection to enter the historical
19. For all the problems inherent in working with published accounts, it is not, however, to be
taken for granted that the exclusive use of archival materials, while vastly more costly, would
necessarily produce a superior sample. It surely would have more incidents, but would not thereby
necessarily have a more representative selection or even one whose biases were easier to assess.
Indeed, occasionally the deliberate efforts erfhistorians to represent reality adequately mqffit actually
improve on what’s in the archives. The French government’s official project of publishing cahiers
has actually produced a more representative sample than the very much larger collection of aD
surviving manuscripts in the archives. For a national picture of grievances one is better off with the
published documents; see Gilbert Shapiro, John Markoff, andSilvio Duncan Baretta, "The Selective
Transmission of Historical Documents: The Case of the Parish Cahiers of 1789,” Histoire et Meson
2 (1987): 115-72. The collection of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century French rural disturbances
collected by Jean Nicolas and Guy Lemarchand is a model of such an exhaustive archival search far
conflict-events, yet it has its biases, too. Not all disturbances were reported; not aDjudicial or police
investigations were equally thorough; not aDarchives have been equally well inventoried. See Jean
Nicolas, "Un chantier toujours neuf," in Jean Nicolas, ed., Atommunis populaires et conscience
sociale, XVIe-XIXe siècles (Paris: Maiome, 1985), 16.
record ?)— all these p rocesses guarantee that the aggregated count o f
incidents o f all sorts will be a very crude m easure indeed.
What can be done rather m ore confidently is to com pare the distributions
o f different classes o f events with one another across tim e and space. W hile
the extent o f relative undercounting o f tax rebellions is unknown (and
therefore the overall proportion o f tax incidents in the sam ple is not
especially inform ative) the shifts over tim e (or space) in the proportion o f
events that concern taxes (or o f districts that have tax rebellions) is far
m ore useful. A long these lines, for exam ple, the variations in tim e or space
in the proportion o f all incidents o f an antiseigneurial character or the
proportion o f antiseigneurial events o f a particular sort is far m ore credible
than any aggregate proportion. W hy? B ecause a tendency o f historians to
overcount antiseigneurial events relative to som e other sort o f incident is
irrelevant to the tem poral or spatial variations in proportions; a tendency o f
historians to overcount incidents in som e periods relative to others is
sim ilarly irrelevant to such com parisons o f proportions.20
To take up another instance: the data set is clearly biased tow ard the
inclusion o f violent events. The peaceful assem blies o f claim -m aking groups
(the countless acts o f petitioning, for exam ple) are virtually excluded by the
definition’s insistence on a group’s direct seizure o f or dam age to another’s
resou rces. This m eans that the overall proportion o f incidents o f a violent
character is o f only lim ited use from the point o f view o f the continuing
discussion o f the place o f violen ce in disorderly politics. W hat is perfectly
possible, how ever, is to chart the variations in violen ce: variations by target,
tactics, tim e, and place. A re certain types o f targets m ore prone to involve
violen ce than others (attacks on the claim s o f the lord rather than the state,
for exam ple)? A re certain tactics inherently violence-prone (dem anding the
lord’s ow n docum ents rather than dem anding that the lord m ake a public
renunciation o f his rights, for exam ple)? D oes the tendency to violen ce shift
with tim e? A re certain regions prone to violence independently o f the
targets o f their attacks? W hile it is not, then, very useful to bring the
aggregate data alone to bear on the recen t and som etim es lurid discussion
by historians o f the violence o f the R evolution,21 com paring the propensities
to personal injury in antiseigneurial events with events that have, say, a
religious elem ent may prove m ore revealing (see below , p. 230).
20. Wide one can abstractly conceive of complex 2- or 3-way interactions of bias, time, and
apace, it is hard to imagine a plausible concrete process that might really produce such complexly
structured biases in actual conflict data.
21. See Brian Singer, “Violence in the French Revolution: Forms of Ingestion/Forma of Expul
sion,” in Ferenc Fehér, ed., The French Revolution and the Birth ofModermij (Berkeley and Los
Angeles: University of California Press, 1990), 201-18; Simon Schama, Citizens:A Chronicle ofthe
French Revolution (New York: Vintage Books, 1990).
Forms of Revolt
If w e exam ine the targets o f our actions, aggregating together all events
from June 1788 through June 1793 that m eet our criteria, w e get a first,
crude sense o f the m ultifarious nature o f rural m obilizations during the
revolutionary crisis. Table 5.1 gives a rough distribution o f those even ts in
broad categories to be explored further. T here are three sets o f figures.
The first colum n indicates how com m on a particular class o f even ts is in our
data; the secon d and third indicate how w idespread such even ts are.22 We
see, for exam ple, that while antiseigneurial events are the m ost com m on,
they are not as w idespread as subsistence events or panics.
Som e 83% o f baillages experienced at least one event o f som e s o r t But
what sort? Under each broad category in this table, I have counted every
event any o f w hose com ponent actions fit under that head. Antiseigneurial
events involved any attack on the lord’s person, property, rights, or anything
that sym bolized the lord. E vents w ere classified as religious if they in any
way had a religious referen t they, therefore, include challenges to the
perogatives o f som e ecclesiastical body, actions over church organization or
personnel and conflicts involving religiously defined m inorities. Subsistence
events w ere struggles over the availability or the price o f food and w ere the
second m ost w idespread form o f con flict Land conflicts involved struggles
Ih b le 5 .1 . Frequency o f Events
Percentage
Percentage o f All Percentage
TVpe o f Event o f AH Bailliages o f An
(Broad Categories) Events with Events Bailliages
Antiseigneurial 36% 49% 41%

Religious 16 39 33
Subsistence 26 67 56
Land conflict 8 26 21
Wage conflict 1 5 4
Panics 13 73 61
Anti-tax 3 23 19
Anti-authority (excluding tax agents) 5 27 22
Counterrevolution 9 15 12
CAO* (4,689) (344) (412)
•Excludes nooconfrontational actions andquestionable cases.
22. The data were tabulated by bailliages. Unless some other figure is specified, this and
subsequent tabulations are for aD bailliages oí metropolitan France that have rural parishes.
Bailliages that participated inthe elections for the Estates-General but do not enter these tabulations
include Corsica, overseas colonies, and purely urban bailliages (such as Paris-within-the-walls).
The French Countryside, 1 7 8 8 -1 7 9 3 219
over the possession or use o f land and may or may not have involved a
seigneurial or ecclesiastical landholder. Wage conflicts pitted rural w orkers
against their em ployers and are the scarcest o f the form s distinguished
here. Panics w ere incidents in which collective action was oriented to an
imaginary enem y, w hether fleeing or m arching to an expected encounter.
Anti-tax events w ere challenges to claim s chi resou rces o f the central
governm ent, both Old Regim e and revolutionary. Anti-authority events w ere
attacks on agents o f governing authority at national, provincial, departm en
tal, or local levels. Finally, counterrevolution involved an overt challenge to
a specifically revolutionary authority, m ost often , as w e shall see below , in
conjunction w ith either certain form s o f religious conflict or in resistance to
conscription. A m ore detailed specification o f these broad labels will follow .
W ith all due reservation about the data at this level o f aggregation, w e find
that if the turbulent countryside was concerned about one arena it would
have to be said to be the seigneurial arena. N onetheless, nearly tw o-thirds
o f all events do not have an antiseigneurial com ponent. I t like A do, w e
develop an “ antifeudal” category by adding to the antiseigneurial group
appropriate actions against ecclesiastical bodies, w e still cover no m ore than
40% o f all even ts.23 If w e consider the geographic extent o f the various
classes o f actions, w e find that both subsistence events and panics actually
surpass antiseigneurial m ovem ents.
T o consider the likely direction o f distortions in our data set, I would
estim ate that the anti-tax events are surely undercounted and that the
apparently rare w age events probably are: anti-tax events because the
historians w hose accounts I used are relatively uninterested (relative to
antiseigneurial events, subsistance events, and counterrevolution); w age
events because they didn't easily fit into the contem porary vocabulary o f
social con flict If w e imagine inflating the figures for w age events a bit and
anti-tax events substantially, w e would thereby shrink the antiseigneurial
share. Antiseigneurial events cannot be equated with the peasant m ovem ent
(although they are its largest single elem ent); the question before us, then,
is to find the place o f antiseigneurial actions within a much broader spectrum
o f rural turbulence.24
23. One may create a subcategory of religious events consisting of conflicts with ecclesiastical
authorities that have dose analogues in antiseigneurial events. These would include attacks on
ecclesiastical lords, of course, but also conflicts over the tithe (often very difficult to distinguish
from ckampart when there is an ecclesiastical lord), and over communal rights to pastures or
woodland. Such events can then be included together with antiseigneurial events in a broader
antifeudal category conceived of the way Ado does. Such antifeudal incidents amount to 40% of all
our events and took place in some 52% of those bailliages where some conflict occurred.
24. Anatoly Ado opened this question by entitling his work "The Peasant Movement” and by
carefully enumerating both antifeudal (understood in much the same way as I have done here) and
subsistence events. But although he intriguingly suggests that the anti-taxactions of the Old Regime
provided a stock of experience drawn on for other goals mthe Revolution (JCresfianskoe dvizkenie.
Antiseigneurial Events
The great diversity o f these num erous actions, is depicted in Table 5 .2 .
This table presents data on the frequencies o f form s o f antiseigneurial
events in tw o w ays. The left colum n gives the percentages o f all antisei
gneurial events o f a particular class. The right colum n presents the propor
tion o f all bailliages that had (me or m ore antiseigneurial events ( = “ antisei
gneurial bailliages” ) in which one or m ore events o f that sam e particular
class took place. (T he tables that follow for other sorts o f even ts follow the
sam e form a t) T h ese categories are by no m eans exclusive. Som e are
subcategories o f others (“ violence against persons” includes “ violen ce
against lords’'). In addition, an event can have m ultiple actions, so that
the sam e event could be counted under several rubrics because several
things happened. Thus percentages can total m ore than 100% . Peasants
invaded the lord’s fields, destroyed his crops, felled his trees, pastured
communal animals on his property (or on what he— but not they— took to
be his property), destroyed his fen ces, and attem pted to redraw the
boundaries o f communal and seigneurial holdings (often insisting that im prop
erly usurped land was being reclaim ed). The lord 's château might be broken
into, and, on ce entered, a variety o f actions might be undertaken: furniture
might be seized or dam aged, the lord’s archives m ight be ransacked in
search o f seigneurial titles or— particularly if the search was resisted— the
docum ents might be set alight T he invaders might demand food or drink
or, in a tense parody o f som e old norm o f hospitality, com pel the lord to
have them served a feast right then and th ere.0
Even without entering the interior o f the building, there w as plenty o f
damage to be done. W hile rem aining outside, the attackers had other m eans
o f challenging the lord’s rights and other m eans o f punishm ent; and such
actions might also proceed or follow indoor actions. The lord m ight be
dragged outside and forced to make a public renunciation o f his rights, often
transcribed by a notary (him self perhaps under com pulsion). The lord’s 2 5
58-60,114) andalthoughhe reiprds wage events as a significant form of conflict, he does not colect
anti-tax events, nor panics, nor counterrevolution, nor wage events. Nor does he convincingly find
any orpnic connection of subsistence and antifeudal events, leaving a certain sense of arbitrariness,
and a certain puzzlement over what to make of his maps. See the discussion, "Table Ronde: Autour
des travaux d’Anatofi Ado sur les soulèvements paysans pendant la Révolution française,” in La
Révolution français* et te monde rural (Paris: Editions du Comité des Travaux Historiques et
Scientifiques, 1989), 521-47.
25. Under the now rare rights to lodging, lords could demand that their subjects put them up;
under similarty rare requisition rights, lords could seize needed supplies at a price they held
appropriate. See Joseph Renauldon, Dictionnaire desfiefs et droits seigneuriaux utiles et honorifiques
(Paris: Deblain, 1788), 1:4; Garaud, Histoire générale du droitprivéfrançais, voL 2, La Révolution
et ¡a propriétéfoncière (fanx. Recueil Sirey, 1958), 64.
The F rench Countryside, 1 7 8 8 -1 7 9 3 221
Table 5 .2 . Types o f Antiseigneurial Events
Percentage of Percentageof
"type of Event Antiseigneurial Antiseigneurial
(Fine Categories) Events Bailliages
Violence
Violence against persons or property S4% 72%
Violence against persons 5 23
Violence against lord 3 16
Château penetrated and interior invaded, with varying
degrees of damage 27 48
Château a target; interior penetrated or exterior damaged S3 68
Destruction (rather than seizure) of food sources; killing in
lord's game reserve; killing pigeons, fish, or rabbits;
destruction of lord’s crop; destruction of lord’s trees 5 19
Titles vs. renunciation
Coerced renunciation of rights 8 20
Searches, seizures, and demands foe documents (at château
or at notary's office) 16 35
Subsistence
Search for food stores; seizure of goods in wine cellar;
compelling lord to feed the invaders 7 28
Recreational
Attacks on lords’ game reserves or game; attacks on raising
of pigeons, rabbits, or fishpond (includes both acts of
seizure and of destruction); open defiance of hunting
restrictions 9 22
Attacks on game reserves or huntingonly; open defiance of
huntingprohibitiononly 3 10
Lord-churchnexus
Destruction of church benches; damage to family tomb;
disruption oí religious ritual hooormg lord 4 17
Dues
Collective and public statement of refusal to pay 10 23
Collective and public refusals to pay; demands for
restitution; attacks on scales 18 31
Coerced restitution only 9 16
Landconflict
ADlandconflicts 11 31
Conflicts over ownership or use-rights mwoods 5 17
Monopolies
Collective and open violation of monopolistic restrictions;
damage to seigneurial nulls, oven, winepress 1 3
Agents
Attacks on persons or property of seigneurialjudges, dues-
coflectors, stewards, notaries, legal advisers 4 16
King as lord
Any antiseigneurial action directed at royal hoMmgs 1 4
Symbolics
Attacks on honorific symbols of seigneurial status
(weathervanes, coats-of-anns, ¿Dows, turrets,
battlements) 12 28
am usem ents m ight be targets: his rabbits or pigeons slain (o r som etim es
seized for food ) and their habitations trashed; his fishpond em ptied or fouled;
his com pulsory mill or oven destroyed. Som etim es the focu s w as quite
specifically the lord’s collection o f dues: he m ight be forced to make
restitution o f such dues; the scales used to m easure his portion o f the crops
m ight be sm ashed; or the com m unity might openly announce its solidarity in
future nonpaym ent, som etim es backed by coercive m easures taken (or at
least threatened) against any w ho might ch oose to continue paying. A t
tim es, the agents o f the lord w ere the target: perhaps his judge, perhaps
his notary, perhaps his ren t-collector, perhaps the guard w ho had often
engaged in a battle o f w its with w ould-be poachers and violators o f hunting
rights; som etim es the lord him self was beaten, an action usually (but not
alw ays) halted short o f his death.
An interesting group o f actions w ere the attacks on the lord-church
nexus: the lord’s fam ily bench in the local church m ight be dram atically tom
out and uncerem oniously (or very cerem oniously) dum ped outside, and
som etim es sm ashed or set afire; m ore rarely but even m ore dram atically the
fam ily tom bs in the church m ight be desecrated.26 Only 4% o f antiseigneurial
events thus challenged the religious warrant for seigneurial authority, but a
m uch larger num ber o f events included actions that had som e religious
aspect: 15% . The seigneurial rights at issue might be those o f an ecclesiasti
cal body: a local m onastery, say, might be the lord under attack. O r, in a
m ore com plex action, a group challenging annual paym ents in kind to the
lord (champart) m ight w ell go on to challenge annual paym ents in kind to a
nearby m onastery (generally a tithe, but som etim es champart as w ell).
In all these w ays, the lord’s prerogatives w ere challenged; his m aterial
accum ulations reclaim ed, dam aged, or desecrated; the legal basis o f his
authority seized from his archives as a text or from his m outh as a sw orn
renunciation; his connection with the sacred grounding o f the com m unity
severed as the fam ily tom b or family bench was tom from the local church.27
26. Such actions, it may be worth pointing out, are hardly inherently antichurch, but might be
experienced as deansing the true Church of an intruder. Some priests, therefore, may well have
encouraged some of these acts, even by example. Jean Bart has found a number of Old Regime
instances from Burgundy’s judicial archives in which priests were convicted of inciting friends to
remove and damage a lord’s bench, of smearing oQon it, of defacing (with grafitti) the tombstone of
the local lord’s unde. See Jean Bart, “Encore un mot sur les curés de campagne . . . , ” in Robert
Chagny, ed., Aux origines provinciales de la Révolution (Grenoble: Presses Universitaires de
Grenoble, 1990), 159. For similar incidents near Toulouse, see Jean Bastier, Laféodalité au siècle
des lumières dans la région de Toulouse (1730^1790) (Paris: Bibliothèque Nationale, 1975), 286-87.
27. The smashing, tearing-out, or burning of churchbenches seem lifted out of centuries of
religious struggle. On Cathobc-Protestant attacks on church benches two centuries earlier, see
Natalie Zemon Davis, “The Rites of Violence” in her Society and Culture in Early Modem Frima
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1975), 173. The same action is sometimes used in struggles
over the Civil Constitution of the Clergy: Chassin reports several such from the spring of 1791; see
In late 1790, peasants in the im poverished countryside around Sarlat w ere

heard to explain this last action by the com mandm ent that all, equally,
should kneel on the church floor before G o d 28 (Villagers near N evers w ent
a step further and com pelled the w ell-off to join them in attending M ass on
their k n ees.)29 And then there w ere the sim ple assaults on the sym bols o f
seigneurahsm that m ade the lord m ore than another man. The w eathervane
w as one such likely target, as w ere turrets and battlem ents. Although the
advance o f the central state had long since rendered the fortress aspect erf
the m edieval castle thoroughly out o f date, many a lord maintained rem inders
o f a w arrior identity in the form o f architectural m otifs o f a thoroughly
decorative sort in their elegant lodgings, only to have these pretty turrets
and graceful battlem ents attract the rage o f peasant com m unities. Any
display o f the fam ily coat-of-arm s w as a tem pting target as w ell. If som e had
justified the lord’s position by claim ing a contract30 and others had invoked
G od's design or the blessings o f tim e,31 still others had pointed to the social
utility o f a w arrior class w hose privileges w ere but ju st repaym ents for
M ood shed on behalf o f com m unity or king.32 Just as som e com m unities
reappropriated the contract and others signaled the withdrawal o f divine
sanction in assaulting the lord-church nexus, still others elim inated the
archaic m ilitary sym bolism ; with its turrets knocked dow n and its coa t-of-
arm s destroyed the château w as ju st a house.33 The lord’s hom e w as to be
no b etter than anyone else’s. A s the Revolution radicalized, in one o f the
many inversions o f the old order by which the Revolution continually
dem onstrated its reality, the lord 's dwelling m ight be searched for firearm s
or hidden counterrevolutionaries, just as the lords on ce som etim es joined
Chartes-Louis Chassât, La préparation de la guerre de Vendée, 1789-1793 (Paris: Paul Dupont,

1892), 1:244.
28. Pierre Caron, “Le mouvement antiseigneurial de 1790 dans le Sartadais et le Quercy,”
Bulletin <THistoireEconomique de la Révolution (1912): 357.
29. Nancy Fitch, "Whose Violence? Insurrection and the Negotiation oí Democratic Politics in
Central France, 1789-1851,” paper presented at the Conference on Violence and the Democratic
Itadition in France, University of California, Irvine, 1994,11.
30. The joint cahier of the dergy and nobikty of Sarrelouis, for example, denies the legitimacy of
any restriction on seigneurial rights that are given m return for earlier concessions (Hyslop,
Guide, 398).
31. The nohOty of Soule defends seigneurial dues “consecrated by so many centuries” (AP
5:779).
32. For surveys of attacks on feudal symbolism in several regions, see Simone Bernard-Griffiths,
Marie-Claude Chemin, and Jean Ehrard, Révolution française et uandalitme révolutionnaire (Paris:
Universitas, 1992).
33. In March 1792, agents of the départementof Ardèche reported to their superiors the peasant
belief “that there is a decree which orders the demolition of all the towers of the châteaux because
they are no longer regarded as anything but houses”: see Anatoly V. Ado, “Le mouvement paysan
et le problème de l’égalité, 1789-1794,” in Albert Soboul, ed., Contributions à l'histoire paysanne
de la Révolutionfrançaise (Paris: Editions Sedales, 1977), 124.
the state in searching peasant hom es for forbidden w eapons or concealed

crim inals. In a parish in Périgord a group o f peasants com pelled a lord to
kiss them as a sign o f fundamental equality.34
And, finally, there w as a striking bit o f byplay around the m eaning o f a
w ooden pole. Lords w ho had proudly dem onstrated their daim s to p ossess
the rights o f "high ju stice” often decorated their lawns with gallow s,
functionless in practice now that capital decisions w ere in the hands o f the
king.35 Even Voltaire, it appears, acquired the right to an elaborate gallow s
when he clim bed his w ay to the proper status.36 Their practical inutility,
how ever, did not spare them destruction in som e parishes— and their
replacem ent by a different pole by which rural com m unities indicated their
ow n pow er and their new ly seized freedom s. In early 1790 antiseigneurial
events in Périgord and Q uercy began to include the installation o f a long
pole o r the trim m ed trunk o f a very straight tree, often decorated with
antiseigneurial m ockery and warnings, in place o f the front-lawn gallow s.
Som etim es, indeed, the new pole w as itself conceived as a gallow s, but now
it w as the peasants’ gibbet rather than the lord’s. Eventually these becam e
known as “ trees o f liberty” but to the peasants o f the southw est they w ere
ju st “m ais.”37 The seem ing sym bolic arbitrariness with which som e country
people tore dow n gallow s and others erected them should not be seen as
indecision on how to sym bolize the fall o f one order and the creation o f
another rather, in that very arbitrariness the com m unity represented itself
as the sou rce o f ju stice. For a brief m om ent, it was not the balance o f forces
betw een w ould-be state-aggrandizing kings and w ould-be autonom ous lords
that would determ ine w ho built gallow s and w here; it was the will o f the
sovereign popular com m unity. The trees o f liberty carried so many m eanings
that the authorities continued to w orry about the intentions o f those w ho
planted them , a circum stance that itself constituted a peasant rejection o f
34. Georges Bussière, Ebules historiquessurlaRévolution enPtrigord(Psria: Librairie Historique

des Provinces, 1903), 3:265-66. Anatoly Ado sees this simply as among the “picturesque details of
the revolts." It seems a very rich image. On the one hand it can be taken without irony as an
application of the egalitarian “fraternal kiss” so common among the revolutionaries (and on which
Robert Damton has commented so interestingly). But it also seems an inversion of the symbolic
center of the overturned feudal world. The freely given vassal-lord kiss had marked and cemented
entry into the relations of unequals; in Sariadais in 1790 the coerced lord-peasant kiss marked and
cemented the entry into the era of equality. See Ado, “Mouvement paysan,” 123; Robert Damton,
TheKiss ofLamourette (New York: Norton, 1990), 3-20.
35. While no one may have hung from them for some time, a graded complexity of galows
architecture permitted an instantaneous recognition of status. Having the right of high justice, but
no fancier title, got a lord the basic two-post model, a baron got four, a duke got six or the top-of-
the-bne eight The lord wbo only hadthe right of lowjustice did not get a gallows at alL (Renauidon,
Dictionnaire desfiefs, 1:478-79).
36. Fernand Caussy, Voltaire, seigneur de village (Paris: Hachette, 1912), 3.
37. Mona Ozouf, Lafite révolutionnaire, 1789-1799 (Paris: Gaffimard, 1976), 280-316.
elite claim s to control m eanings. Am ong the likely m eanings was a referen ce
to the sheltering tree on the village green before the church, the m ost
com m on m eeting place for Old Regim e village com m unities, in Jean-Pierre
Gutton’s estim ation.38 N ow the com m unity extended its dom inion to the
seigneurial lawn.
In considering the relative frequency o f the different m odalities o f chal
lenging the seigneurial regim e, w e m ust rem em ber that the nature o f our
sou rces m akes it certain that many incidents are not fully described and
that, th erefore, all the figures for d ie percentage o f events with particular
characteristics err on the low side. N onetheless, som e o f these figures
seem notew orthy. W hile m ore than half o f incidents involved som e overt
violen ce (by which I mean here physical iqjuries to persons or property) as
opposed to public declarations, invasions o f fields without dam age, penetra
tion o f the château (w ithout smashing furniture, manhandling the lord, e tc .),
seizing animals but not harming them , dem ands or threats— alm ost all o f
that violen ce is property dam age.39 W hile lords may have been quite terrified
by these even ts (and som e were hurt or even killed and many threatened)
revenge on the person o f the lord played a fairly small role.
Since the data are undoubtedly skew ed to underrepresent less violent
form s o f making claim s, one m ust be skittish about using such data to
attem pt to assess the centrality o f violen ce in the Revolution. But, in this
light, it is w orth observing that the direction o f bias alm ost certainly m eans
that the proportion o f incidents with severe personal injury or m ajor property
destruction w as actually less than m y figures indicate. O f cou rse there w as
violen ce against persons and that violence dom inated the w ays som e recalled
the great antiseigneurial risings. The lynching o f tw o royal officials in the
streets o f Paris a w eek after the taking o f Bastille plainly shocked many
deputies as their discussion o f the grim even ts m akes evident (4 P 8 :2 6 3 -
67). A s Tim othy Tackett puts it: “ The Rousseauist conception o f the
Com m on Man as repository o f goodness and truth was frequently replaced,
or at least strongly m odified, by the im age o f the violent, unpredictable, and
dangerous classes o f July and A u g u st"40
An im portant recen t literature is developing that places violen ce at the
cen ter o f the revolutionary experience. Am ong the many debate-provoking
elem ents o f Sim on Schama’s Citizens, none occasioned m ore com m ent than
38. Jean-Piene Gutton, La sociabiHU viUagtoise dans IAncienne France: Solidarités et voisinages
du XVIe au XVIII« stick (Paris: Hachette, 1979), 74; see abo Henry Babeau, Les assemblies
générales des communautés ¿habitants en France duXVIIIe stick à la Rivolulion (Paris: Rousseau,
1893), 21-22.
39. A broader definition of violence would atJ find the preponderance of such violence directed
aganst property.
40. Timothy Ihckett, “Nobles and Third Estate in the Revolutionary Dynamic of The National
Assembly, 1789-1790,” AmericanHistoricalReview94 (1989): 279.
his insistence that violen ce was at the very core o f the Revolution.41 Brian
Singer, in prose less vivid but m ore analytic, sim ilarly urges us to see the
violen ce as far m ore than a m ere by-product o f rational actions.421 shall
m erely observe here that the m ultiple form s o f antiseigneurial violen ce seem
to be far m ore com m only directed at obliterating what distinguishes the
lords from other human beings, that is to say, annihilating a social role,
rather than the occupants o f that role:43 the château is to be stripped o f what
m akes it seigneurial from its archives to its w arrior sym bols; the lord’s
animals are to be shared or slaughtered; dues are not to be paid.
O ne extrem ely interesting cluster o f actions involve the destruction o f
food sou rces. W hile som e peasant com m unities obtained m eat while defying
the lord’s exclusive rights by hunting on the lord’s p reserves,44 others
appear to have killed the gam e and left the carcasses;45 while som e forced
the lord to feed them , others destroyed the lord’s crop ;46 w hile som e made
use o f the products o f the lord’s forests, others appear to have prim arily
dam aged the tre e s;47 while som e seized the creatures the lord was privi
leged to raise (pigerais, rabbits, fish), others seem ed to have been prim arily
concerned w ith destroying d ovecotes, w arrens, and ponds (and their feath-
41. “. . . it [violence] was not merely an unfortunate byproduct of politics, or the disagreeable
instrument by which other more virtuous ends were accomplished or vicious ones thwarted. In
some depressingly unavoidable sense, violence was the Revolution itself.” See Schama, Citizens,
xv. See also Schama’s remarks, 445-47.
42. For his important statement of the issues, see Singer, “Violence in the French Revolution.”
43. For a similar observation on low levels of personal antiseigneurial violence, see lam A.
Cameron, Crime and Repression m the Auvergne and the Guyenne, 1720-1790 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1981), 241.
44. A long tradition of solitary poaching and of communal sheltering of poachers bes behind such
acts, to be sure; but probably a more immediate ancestor is to be found in dramatic instances of
flagrant and insubordinate defiance of the lord’s daims. Anne-Marie Cocida-Vaillières, who has
studied such events in Guyenne, thinks them often the work of those whose relative prosperity or
experience of urban life provided the resources for openly challenging the lords. See "La contesta
tion des privilèges seigneuriaux dans le fonds des Eaux et Forêts. L’exemple acquitain dans la
seconde moitié du XVÜIe siècle," in Jean Nicolas, Mouvements populaires et conscience sociale,
XVle-XIXe siècles (Paris: Maloine, 1985), 211-12 and "Les seigneurs et la forêt en Périgord aux
temps modernes,” in André Chastel, ed., Le château, la chasse et la forit (Bordeaux: Editioas du
Sud-Ouest, 1990), 101-4.
45. At the same time that neighboring villages in Cambrésis were breaking into local abbeys to
seize grain, in early May 1789, a dozen communities around Oisy exterminated a lord's game; see
Georges Lefebvre, Les Paysans du Nord pendant la Révolution française (Paris: Armand Coin,
1972), 356.
46. On March 26, 1789, for example, the holdings of Count de Galtet near Draguignan were
attacked by peasants who drove their livestock on his sown fields, ruining them; see Jules Viguier,
La convocation des états-généraux en Provence (Paris: Lenoir, 1896), 269-70.
47. Local officials reported on November 25, 1790, that fruit trees of the abbey of Beaubec in
Normandy were cut down, a rather late date for collecting fruit; see Philippe Goqjaid, L'Abolition
de la “féodalitr dans Upays deBray, 1789-1793 (Paris: Bibliothèque Nationale, 1979), 99.
ered , furry, o r finny inhabitants).48 It is striking that these acts o f destruction

are scarcely less num erous in our data than are seizures o f food from the lord
(5% versus 7% o f even ts) although rather m ore restricted geographically
(occurring in 19% vs. 28% o f antiseigneurial baiUiages).
Should w e see such actions as m erely the blind anger o f those for whom
adequate diets w ere an uncertain but always serious undertaking but am ong
whom lived lords w ho made o f provisioning a form o f play? V iew ed in this
light, such actions would be the “ irrational” destructiveness o f the envious.
But perhaps one m ight see such actions as an assertion o f a claim to a social
order in which peasants, like lords, can now defend their productive labors
against p ests. The lords’ special rights in food production had perm itted the
rabbits, pigeons, ponds, and hunts to dam age the lands and crops o f
their disarm ed country neighbors, thereby placing the lords’ definition o f
w orthw hile activity over the peasants’ (in fact, obliterating it).49 N ow the
peasants, asserting claim s to adequate w eapons, w ere protecting their ow n
crops by defining their activities as valuable and redefining the lords’
game— and gam es— as so many pests in a w ay that actually eating the
rabbits or fish could not do. If com m unities like N orroy (see above, p. 120)
in M arch 1789 could express their fear that when their grain ripened in the
sum m er, the lords, carried away by the hunt, could again tram ple it, it was
now the turn o f other villagers to decide w here and when to hunt and w hose
fields to tram ple or spare. In this light, the destructive violen ce looks far
less blind; rather, it appears a constituent part o f contesting w hose definition
o f value is to claim pride o f place, b this light such actions would be o f a
¡a ece with the erection/destruction o f gallow s as part o f contesting the
sou rces o f the authority to render ju stice. In reflecting on the tw o actions,
the consum ption or the destruction o f the lord’s gam e, w e have tw o quite
different th eses: in the first the distinction in action corresponds to a
distinction o f a rational search for food on the one hand as opposed to a
destructive violence on the other; in the second w e have the distinction
betw een the actions o f those m oved by hunger and o f those m oved
by dignity.50
48. In the spring of 1791 peasant communities around Uzerche, HiDe, and Brive fought what
Jean Boutier caDs “the war against the ponds” in which large numbers of peasants seized their fish
and, in the process, destroyed them, a point seen favorably by local urban radicals who regarded
the ponds as environmentally damaging. See Boutier, Campagnes en émoi, 118-24.
49. Rabbits, pigeons, hunting were often, in principle, activities constrained by customary legal
codes, a set of principles often violated. A typical such rule might be that all lords in the province
could have “dosed” warrens (surrounded by walls or water-filled moats) but “open” warrens were
only permitted those with enough land so that neighbors' crops were not ravaged; see Garaud,
Révolution etpropriétéfoncière, 92.
50. In a somewhat similar vein, Jean-Pierre Hirsch distinguishes among those for whom hunting
in the summer oí 1789 was “a pleasure long forbidden,” those who experienced “the sensation of at
last achieving the dignity at bearing arms” and those "moved simply by hunger"; see Jean-Pierre
It is also w orth pausing over the relatively small num ber o f incidents in
which seigneurial agents are targets. H istorians have com m only asserted
that the lord 's agents, by interposing them selves as interm ediaries—
w hether as du es-collectors, judges, estate m anagers, or legal advisers—
becam e for the peasants with whom they dealt, the personifications o f the
ills inflicted by the seigneurial regim e. T h ese agents thereby w arded o ff
hostility that m ight have been directed at the m ore distant lord .51 T he
evidence o f the actual insurrections as w ell as the evidence presented earlier
from the cahiers suggest that on a national scale (see Chapter 2, p. 53)
these interm ediaries, this w orld betw een the lord and the peasant, w ere in
fact relatively m inor concerns to the country people. W hile the French
peasants may not have loved the lord’s agents, these agents w ere hardly
significant enough to constitute a m ajor target o f either grievance or
rebellion.52 The peasants’ target seem s to have been a social institution and
not, prim arily, its human beneficiaries.53 The country people w ere not, as
som e o f the literature has it, sidetracked by the lord’s agents nor w ere they
blinded by the search for revenge on the lord him self. Our evidence confirm s
the observation o f A do (Hi the scarcity o f punitive actions undertaken in
Hirsch. La Nuit du 4 août (Paris: GaDbnard/JuDiani, 1978), 234. Jean-Sylvain BaBy, first mayor of
revolutionary Paris, thought that the "disastrous" outpouring of hunting that first summer spared
the lands of "patriot princes” like the duke of Orléans. If this daim could be confirmed, it also would
assign hunger a reduced place as motive. See Mémoires de Bailly (Paris: Baudouin, 1821), 2:244.
51. See, for example, Saint-Jacob, ftysans de la Bourgogne duNord, 428-34; Cobban, TheSocial
Interpretation of the French Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1965), 47-49.
52. Indeed, in some places the agents may have turned into the local leadership once the lord
was pushed aside. That, at any rate, is whatJean-PierreJessenne found inwhat is the most detailed
study to date of the Revolution’s transformation of village politics. In Artois, those whose power
had been conferred by the lords before 1789 did weOin the municipal elections of 1790, unless the
particular local community was at legal loggerheads with the lord—a situation that identified the
agent too closely, Jessenne contends, with his master. The lord’s appointed lieutenant became the
Revolution’s elected mayor. The 1790 elections were no fluke; the same group did well in 1791.
While the 1792 upheaval brought in midsized landowners, urbanites, and artisans, these newcomers
continued the same policies locally; and the post-Thermidor era saw the triumphant and long-lived
return of the village elite. Is the success of the former seigneurial agents of Artois duplicated
elsewhere—especially in the staunch zones of early antiseigneurial activism such as around Mficon,
in Franche-Comté, Dauphiné, and coastal Provence or in later antiseigneurial epicenters fice
Quercy, Périgord, and upper Brittany? Without the replications that one hopes will be inspired by
Jessenne’s marvelous study one does not know; but Nancy Fitch has found that insurrectionary
actions in a sharecropping region of central France in 1790 sometimes involved the forceable
exclusion of this rural stratum between lord and peasant from political life. See Fitch, “Whose
Violence?” 12-13; Jessenne, fournir au village et révolution: Artois, 1760-1848 (Ldle: Presses
Universitaires de Lile, 1967).
53. For similar judgments, see Jessenne, fournir au village, 59; Georges Fournier, “Société
paysanne et pouvoir local en Languedoc pendant la Révolution,” in La Révolution française et le
monde rural (Paris: Editions du Comité des TVavaux Historiques et Scientifiques, 1989), 388;
Steven G. Reinhardt, Justice in the Sarladais, 1770-1790 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University
Press, 1991), 231.
1789 against the lords and their servitors, which he contrasts with the
m urderous insurrectionary practice o f the risings o f the fourteenth and
seventeenth centuries.545Our data show an altered peasantry. The pattern
o f violent action, like the pattern o f expressed grievances, suggests a
peasantry w ith an abstract conception o f a social system , not fooled by its
personification in interm ediaries at alL56 Their actions are violent, to be
sure, and often inherently violent, not m erely by-products o f resistance to
peaceable grieving (although resistance might w ell augm ent the violence
and, let us not forget, m y data certainly underrepresents peaceful even ts).
But to be angry d oes not m ean that one m ust be blinded by anger and to be
violent d oes not mean that one’s actions are unguided by reason.
Incidents with a Religious Aspect

Table 5.1 show s incidents with a religious aspect to have been rather less
than half as com m on as antiseigneurial events (although som e such events
took place in about three-fourths as many bailliages as saw antiseigneurial
even ts). Indeed, the tw o categories are far from totally d istin ct som e o f
the events designated “ religious” w ere attacks on the seigneurial rights o f
ecclesiastical institutions, often m onastic establishm ents, and are counted
under the antiseigneurial rubric as welL Table 5.3 show s the range o f such
“ religiou s" events. The dem ands for titles, the looting and destruction o f
docum ents, the coerced renunciations o f claim s all m arked the struggle
against ecclesiastical lords as w ell as their lay fellow s; so did land invasion,
fen ce destruction, forest dam age, and the like. M onasteries w ere a good
target o f food searches, ju st as châteaux w ere. But it w as not m erely
through the existen ce o f ecclesiastical lords that the antiseigneurial risings
overlapped with conflicts concerning the church. The various form s o f
resistance to the tithe w ere also those familiar from the antiseigneurial
m ovem ent: destruction o f scales for determ ining the ecclesiastical portion
o f the grain, forceful public and collective avowals o f determ ined refusal,
attacks on tith e-collectors, destruction o f relevant docum ents, not to m en
54. Ado, Kresfianskoe dvtehenie, 119.

55. In a dose study oí rural contestation in Vivarais, Gérard Sabatier shows howviolence against
persons disappears between “Rowe's revolt” in 1670 and the revolt of the “armed masks” of 1783,
this last characterized as “the incineration of the material possessions and the instruments of
oppression without the extermination of the oppressors." One wonders whether this shift can be
generalized to other regions. See Gérard Sabatier, "De la révolte de Roure (1670) aux Masques
Aimés (1783): La mutation du phénomène contestataire en Vivarais,” in Jean Nicolas, ed.,
Mouvementspopulara et conscience sociale, XVIe-XIXe sticks (Paris: Makme, 1985), 130.
tion the diversified array o f techniques o f surreptitious evasion.56 Indeed, it

is frequently quite difficult to discover from the accounts o f the revolts
w hether the jurists o f the day would have regarded the particular exaction
that occasion ed a rising as tithe or champart since the form s o f relevant
action w ere indistinguishable. If peasants challenged w ith force the collection
o f som e o f their grain by an ecclesiastical body, it is not always clear
w hether it w as as in its capacity as lord or as tithe-holder that such a body
w as attacked. But then the ûûte-champart confusion is one o f many key
points that associated the ecclesiastical and the seigneurial (se e Chapter 4,
p. 157). This suggests that it m ight be useful to con ceive o f a broader
category o f antifeudal actions by which I m ean here antiseigneurial actions
plus those actions against the church in its capacity as lord, as proprietor,
or as tith e-collector. D efined in this w ay, antifeudal actions make up tw o-
fifths o f all rural actions in the half-decade under scrutiny and took place in
rather m ore than half o f all bailliages that saw som e form o f rural revolt (see
Table 5 .1 ).
T he antifeudal elem ent, how ever, hardly exhausts aU actions with som e
religious dim ension, for the revolutionary reorganization o f the church
polarized the rural w orld. W hen the revolutionary state insisted that the
reorganized church w as a church o f the Revolution and that the clergy w ere
now civil servants, expected like other d vil servants to take an oath to the
new regim e, the stage was set for som e o f the m ost passionately felt
bitterness in the French countryside in the entire decade.57 T he “ constitu
tional” priest, w ho had accepted the Revolution’s dem ands, w as threatened,
was spit on, was cursed, was stoned, in many a village; while in other
peasant com m unities, it was the “non-juror,” the “ refractory” priest w ho
refused to g o along, w ho found him self beaten, w ho found his lodgings
burned, w ho was driven away.
A s Table 5 .3 show s, incidents involving the Civil Constitution o f the
C lergy actually are a bit m ore num erous than the antifeudal share o f
religiously tinged events. But they also have a strikingly different character,
which is revealed in their particular pattern o f personal violen ce. Table 5 .3
show s that “ religious” events are far m ore likely to be characterized by
56. Henri Marion, La dbne ecclésiastique en France au XVIIIe siicU et sa suppression (Bordeaux:
Imprimerie de l'Université, 1912); Marie-Thérèse Lordn, "Un musée imaginaire de la niae
paysanne: La fraude des dédmabies du XlVe au XVIIIe siècle dans la région lyonnaise," Etudes
rurales, no. 51 (1973), 112-24; jean Nicolas, “La dime: Contrats d’affermage et autres documents
décimaux," in Roger Devos et aL, La pratique des documents anciens: Actes publics et notariés,
documents administratiß et comptables (Annecey: Archives Départementales de la Haute-Savoie,
1978), 173-94; Jean Rives, Dune et société dans Farchevêché cTAuch au XVIIIe siècle (Paris:
Bibliothèque Nationale, 1976), esp. 145-62; Georges Frèche, Tbulouse et la région Midi-Pyrénées
au siècle des lumières (vers 1670-1789) (Paris: Cujas, 1976), 536-43.
57. Timothy Tackett, Religion, Revolution and Regional Culture m France: The Ecclesiastical
Oath of1791 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986).
Thble 5 .3 . Types o f Religious Events
Percentage Percentage o f
Type o f Event o f Religious Bailliages with
(Fine Categories) Events Religious Events
Violence
Violence against d a k s 47% 58%
(1) Old Regime roles (priest, bishop, canon,
monk) 7 18
(2) Nonjurors 14 34
(3) Constitutionals 26 20
Monastery penetrated or trashed 18 36
Monastery or its holdings trashed 24 46
Monastery badly damaged or destroyed 6 12
Titles vs. renunciation
Coerced renunciation 7 10
Searches, seizures, and demands for
documents (monastery and notary) 4 10
Subsistence
Search for food stores; seizure o f goods in
wine cellar; compelling monastics to feed
the invaders 3 13
Tithe
AH challenges to tithe 8 20
Coerced restitution or other seizures o f cash
or exactions 3 11
Lord-church nexus
Destruction o f church benches; damage to
family tomb; disruption o f religious ritual
honoring lord 9 21
Land
All land conflicts (including woods) 5 16
Conflicts over ownership or use-rights in
woods 3 9
Destruction o f woods or orchards 1 6
Agents
Attacks on persons or property o f seigneurial
judges (of ecclesiastical lords), dues-
coflectors, stewards, notaries, legal
advisers 1 3
Civil constitution
Attacks on anything associated with issues
arising from constitutional church (includes
attacks on both jurors and noqjurors and
buddings used by them) 42 49
“Antifeudal” : events with antiseigneurial
analogues 39 49
violence against persons than are antiseigneurial events. Som ewhat less
than half o f all religious events include som e anti-person violence— ten tim es
the com parable tendency in antiseigneurial events. Am ong these violent
acts, w e may distinguish those directed against occupants o f roles in the
Catholic clergy as such— roles that had existed in the Old Regim e and that
exist today— from those directed against those w ho had chosen one or the
other side in the great divide opened up by the oath. V iolence directed
against pre-oath roles accounts for 7% o f all "religious” incidents w hile the
violen ce against nonjurors or ju rors, social categories that (wily existed by
virtue o f revolutionary legislation, contributed respectively double and m ore
than triple that num ber o f violent events. N otice that violence against pro
revolutionary constitutional clerics was both m arkedly m ore num erous (26%
vs. 14% o f all religious even ts) and m arkedly m ore restricted geographically
(20% vs. 34% o f bailliages with "religious” even ts). T h ose w ho opposed
the pro-revolutionary priesthood with violen ce, although m ore confined to
particular regions than those w ho violently attacked the clergy w ho dis
sented, w ere also m ore intensively aggressive. Unlike the antiseigneurial
m ovem ent, then, both the constitutional church and the illegal church o f the
nonjurors w ere attacked in their personified form , the local p riest
W hile the conflicts over the Civil Constitution w ere unusually prone to
take the form o f personal violence, to a reduced extent such a tendency
perm eated other form s o f religious contestation. Even if w e rem ove from
the religious category all incidents arising out o f the Civil Constitution w e
still have a rate o f personal injury o f 12% , m ore than double the antiseigneur-
ial figure. W hile the specific issue o f the Civil Constitution seem s to have
been largely experienced in French villages as a question o f w ho is the
rightful priest58 a personalizing tendency seem s to have inhered in religious
conflict as such. Am ong the less com m on form s o f religiously tinged conflict
w ere instances o f attacks on m em bers o f religiously defined groups: Jew s in
A lsace59 and, m ore frequently, Protestants in the countryside around
N îm es.60 M ight such incidents also be held to exhibit the personification o f
conflict that seem s to mark religiously tinged events elsew here?
58. A smaller number of incidents involved the redefinition of diocesan or parish boundaries that
were part of the new religious order. There were a number of attacks on the buildings used by the
fraction of the clergy one opposed. And defenders of the noiqurors had some routines other than
attacking the constitutional clergy. For example, they often held religious processions of an openly
political character. (I found no incidents in which pro-constitutional peasants demonstrated their
stand with such a religious procession.)
59. Jean-Claude Richez, "Emeutes antisémites et Révolution en Alsace,” in Fabienne Gambrele
and Michel TVibitsch, eds., Révolte et société (Paris: Histoire au Présent, 1988), 1:114-21; Rodolphe
Reuss, “L’antisémitisme dans le bas-Rhin pendant la Révolution (1790-1793),” in Revue des Etudes
Jwœ 68 (1914): 246-83.
60. For some examples, see Gwynne Lewis, TheSecond Vendée: TheContinuity ofCounterrevolu
tion in the Department of the Gard, 1789-1815 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978), 24-25. Peasants
Although the tendency to invest persons with great sym bolic pow er was
a com m on trait o f religiously oriented events, the source o f energy (defined
by antagonists as benevolent or m alevolent) might be found in som e other
con crete location as w ell A fter a series o f incidents beginning on E aster
Sunday 1792, in which peasant groups that may have num bered in the
thousands assem bled by an oak w here they saw the Virgin, local supporters
o f the Revolution cut the old tree dow n.61 One thinks o f Natalie Zem on
D avis’s discussion o f Catholic-Protestant differences in the violen ce each
w orked upon the other tw o centuries and m ore before the Revolution. T he
distinctive (but not exclusive) Catholic elem ent was the physical destruction
o f persons harboring pollution, Protestants being inclined (but not uniquely
so) to see pollution in m aterial objects. O ne w onders, how ever, w hether
the Protestant drive to create a new ly structured religious com m unity m ight
not be the key to acts that dism antled structures, but left persons intact
and, presum ably, available to be reintegrated into a reform ed church. If one
lod es for traditional sou rces o f rural conflict patterns in the revolutionary
years, a “ Protestant” pattern seem s pervasive: the objects that make a man
a lord are destroyed, the man is spared. But when the source o f conflict is
the Civil Constitution o f the C lergy, both sides cleanse the com m unity by
drawing on “ Catholic” patterns o f assaulting the person o f the d efiler.62
T h e pattern o f peasant action against the lords when considered in
contrast with religiously oriented events, suggests that with regard to the
seigneurial rights a restructuring o f social relations was in order, not the
exterm ination o f enem ies.
Anti-tax Events
Although no topic so preoccupies the cahiers o f the countryside nearly as
m uch as the financial dem ands o f the state (see Chapter 2 ), anti-tax revolts
are a relatively scant 3% o f all events. T hey are, how ever, fairly w idespread:
our sou rces identified at least one such event in one-fifth o f the bailliages o f
France. Table 5 .4 displays the principal form s and targets o f tax revolts. In
challenging the state’s tax-collection apparatus, rural com m unities m ight
attack the physical m anifestations o f the tax adm inistration (the barriers at
which goods had to be unloaded and inspected for a m ultiplicity o f tolls, the
salt-w arehouses, the adm inistrative headquarters); they m ight g o after the
were also involved in Protestant-Catholic dashes in—as wefl as near—southern towns Klee Nîmes;
such incidents are surely underrepresented in the data.
61. Célesin Port, La Vendit angevine: Les origines—(insurrection (janvier 1789 mars 1793)
(Paris: Hachette, 1888), 1:323-31.
62. See Davis, “The Rites of Violence," 173-75.
persons or property o f the adm inistrative personnel o f the tax system ; they
m ight assem ble in force to openly and m assively resist attem pts at collec
tion; they m ight seize and destroy the tax record s, a form o f action closely
analogous to attacks on the records o f lord o r m onastery that indicated w ho
was to pay what.
T he rather small num ber o f anti-tax revolts found raises intertw ined
m ethodological and substantive issues. A t least three quite different hypoth
eses m ay be suggested to account for this low incidence. First o f all, it is
conceivable that rural hostility tow ard the exactions o f lord and church w ere
far m ore bitterly resented than those o f the state. This would be particularly
notew orthy in that tax grievances in the cahiers are considerably m ore
num erous than grievances concerning the seigneurial regim e and the ecclesi
astical exactions (see Chapter 2 ). But, as I have shown in Chapter 3 (see
Table 3 .1 ), paym ents to church and lord drew especially bitter com plaints.
W hile such com plaints are considerably few er than tax grievances, the
people o f the countryside w ere a good deal m ore likely to call for the
outright abolition o f seigneurial rights and ecclesiastical paym ents w hile they
tended to urge the reform o f taxation. It is, then, imaginable that at the
very on set o f revolution, taxation w as far less likely to be experienced as an
appropriate target for collective resistance. It is particularly striking that
Philippe Goujard has called our attention to rural petitioners during the
Revolution w ho explicitly say that they resp ect the laws on taxation but n ot
Tfeble 5 .4 . Types o f Anti-tax Events
Percentage Percentage
Type o f Event o f Anti-tax o f Anti-tax
Forms
Attacks on tax facilities 25% 40%
Attacks on persons or property o f tax officials 30 41
Collective and public statements o f resistance 46 55
Attacks on tax records 10 16
Targets
Tax on salt (gabelle) 18 23
Taxes on alcoholic beverages (aides) 30 41
Town duties (octrois) 8 14
Tax on tobacco (tabacs) 4 8
Principal direct tax (taille) 3 6
Indirect taxes in general 13 16
Direct taxes in general 3 4
AH attacks on indirect taxes 61 66
AH attacks on direct taxes 6 10
the continued enforcem ent o f seigneurial rights.63 If there is anything to

such a hypothesis, it is all the m ore notew orthy when w e recall that the
great revolts o f the previous century w ere so strongly focu sed on state
revenues. In this regard the insurrectionary pattern o f the late eighteenth
century m arked a great break with past traditions o f rebellion.
T h ere is a second conceivable explanation o f the data, at (Hice substantive
and m ethodological. Our sou rces, as w e have indicated, are undoubtedly far
richer and m ore thorough in their recording o f conflict to the extent that
such conflict was open, collective, and aggressive. We exacerbated such a
distortion o f reality by deliberately not recording even ts w e encountered
that did not m eet these criteria. Yet w e know that the w eak deploy a
considerable range o f hidden, furtive, and anonym ous form s o f resistance.
It is conceivable that passive noncom pliance with taxation dem ands w ere
pow erfully effective in the clim ate o f 1789 and beyond, effective enough that
the risky w ork o f open, explicit, and forceful challenge in public w as a gam e
hardly w orth the candle.
N ow revolutionary France would seem to have been a tax-evader’s
paradise. A lison Patrick,646 5com m enting on the serious revenue shortfalls in
the early 1790s, tellingly points out how much o f a m ess the new tax
situation was with its m ix o f new taxes, reform ed old taxes, and still
mandated arrears from the p a st Local officials, often with no experience in
adm inistering anything and with little guidance from an official hierarchy in
p rocess o f form ation, learning to hire clerks and keep files, found them selves
dealing with six different tax rolls (one for the ex-privileged, supposed to
cough up their share for half o f 1789; w ie for everyone (no m ore privileges)
for 1790 but still using pre-revolutionary taxes; and four for the Revolution’s
various new taxes). A s Patrick points out, it is a testim ony to their
seriousness o f purpose that these officials managed to collect anything. T he
steady and ultim ately drastic fall in the recovery o f indirect taxes show s that
the reform sentim ents o f the cahiers gradually yielded, for many peasants,
to the possibility o f avoidance. The m ost recen t estim ates indicate, for
exam ple, that in 1791-92 only 45% o f what was hoped for in 1791 was
collected , dow n to 27% the follow ing year, then 20% and ultim ately a pitiful
9% in 1 7 9 4 -9 5 .66 W hen w e realize, how ever, that these goals set for 1791
63. PIdippe Goqjard, "Les pétitions aucontraté féodal Loi contre loi,"mLaRtmlutionfrançaise
tt Umonde rural (Paris: Editions du Comité des lYavaux Historiques et Scientifiques), 72.
64. Alison Patrick, "French Revolutionary Local Government, 1789-1792,” in Cohn Lucas, ed.
The French Revolution and the Creation ofModem Political Culture, voL 2, TheMetical Culture of
theFrench Revolution (Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1988), 399-420.
65. J. A. Le Goff and D. M. G. Sutherland, "The Revolution and the Rural Economy,” m Alan
Forrest and PeterJones, ReshapingFrance: Town, Country andRegion duringthe French Revolution
(Manchester Manchester University Press, 1991), 70.
w ere, as L e G off and Sutherland put it, “astronom ic” (72), one will incline
to agree as w ell that “a surprising amount o f tax w as collected ” (73). All o f
this indicates, I would suggest, that a w idespread w illingness to pay
coexisted with a w idespread willingness to resist, and is consistent w ith the
m ore m oderate tones with which taxation—at least direct taxation— w as
treated in the cahiers (see Chapter 3, pp. 100-109).
For those w ho would avoid paym ent as chaos enveloped the tax system ,
why fight head on what one could easily sidestep? If one could avoid loathed
taxes by m ere nonpaym ent, better to risk on e’s neck in attacking the lords
than for goals achievable in safer w ays. R. B. R ose, one o f the few historians
to have treated the tax revolts in any detail, argues that an initial burst o f
attacks on the facilities and personnel o f tax collection was su cceeded by
w idespread civil disobedience. A return to open and direct attack would take
place w henever the authorities actually attem pted to run the risks o f
seriously attem pting collection .66
There is yet a third possibility to be grappled with, this tim e a purely
m ethodological one. Perhaps the research o f historians has understressed tax
revolt relative to other kinds erf events. Both antiseigneurial events and
counterrevolutionary ones have found obsessive chroniclers because these
seats erf actions are deem ed important by significant schools erf interpretation.
Antiseigneurial events are (dose to the concerns erf M arxists eager to demon
strate the antifeudal character erf the Revolution, while enem ies (or champions)
erf the counterrevolution have invested much energy in depicting the nefarious
(or heroic) struggles waged by w estern peasants that led up to the full-scale
revolt erf 1793. Taxation, how ever, has rarely been seen as central to any
school erf interpretation or any post hoc declaration erf political allegiance. The
result o f this neglect is a scarcity erf detailed research on tax payment and tax
resistance under the Revolution. The country people’s extrem ely strong
concern with taxation— recall again that Chapter 2 showed it first and forem ost
among rural concerns in the cahiers— suggests that m ore attention be paid by
historians to insurrections with an anti-taxation thrust
The purely m ethodological hypothesis o f undercounting may be circum vented
by m ethodological means. Instead o f restricting our focus to the overall extent
66. R. B. Rose, “Tax Revolt and Popular Organization in Picardy, 1789-1791,” A s/ andPresent
43 (1969): 92. Donald Sutherland, drawing on anecdotal evidence, advances the conjecture that
anti-tax actions were much more common a few years beyond our time-frame here; as the ease of
nonconfrontational avoidance evaporated with the successfully reorganized fiscal system, those who
did not want to pay, now, had to fight—and they lost No one has done any systematic enumeration
of anti-tax actions in the 1790s, but the suggestion of an increase later in the decade is plausible,
especially if we complement Sutherland’s thesis with the observation that the antiseigneurial war
was over and peasant discontent, if transmuted into collective action, would have been directed
against new opportune targets. See Donald Sutherland, “Violence and the Revolutionary State,”
paper presented at the Conference on Violence and the Democratic Dradition in France, University
of California, Irvine, 1994.
o f antiseigneurial and anti-tax uprisings, w e shall explore how the relative

preponderances changed in the course o f the Revolution (as they do). We shall
not limit ourselves in other words to the relatively problem atic aggregate
indications o f a great antiseigneurial predominance among form s o f revolt, but
shall show the rapid growth in this predominance with the Revolution, thereby
making the case that something about the Revolution itself played a m ajor role
in attracting peasant violence to the seigneurial regim e (see Chapter 6).
M ethodologically, w e shall be comparing com parisons and thereby sidestepping
the issue o f whether historians have wildly underreported on anti-tax m ove
m ents in the Revolution generally. Perhaps they did, but w e shall ask when
during the Revolution do our data indicate that the relative salience erf antisei
gneurial m ovem ents (as com pared, among other things, with anti-tax m ove
m ents) was especially heavy, a quantity far less subject to challenge as to the
unreliability o f the aggregate data.
One last possibility to be considered is that there might be som ething to
all three hypotheses. Antiseigneurial m ovem ents, in this view , drew on a
greater fund o f rural hostility to begin with. T hey also drew on a greater
payoff for overt challenges. D ivisions am ong governm ent agents and officials
on seigneurial rights m eant that such open confrontations m obilized highly
placed allies as w ell as opponents. Finally, the grow ing antiseigneurial
character o f the countryside was itself what led to such anti-taxation even ts
as took place to have been understudied.
In light o f such considerations, it is interesting to note that o f anti-tax
actions that entered our data file, a considerable num ber w ere only minimally
confrontational statem ents o f refusal, rather than offensive attacks on the
persons or facilities o f the collection system ; a collective im peding o f the
local w eb o f tax collection rather than an attem pt to dism antle it or intim idate
its directors. W hy are such actions so m uch m ore salient than analogous
actions against the seigneurial regim e or the tithe? Perhaps the relative
costs o f other m easures is to the p oin t To seize the archives o f lord or
m onastery, to attack the person or property o f the lord or the local religious
establishm ent, to w reck the scales used in assessm en t often required only
a little travel tim e: the lord’s château or the relevant m onastery w ere
often nearby. The tax adm inistration’s records, how ever, w ere kept in
adm inistrative headquarters, and w ere located in a town— as w ere the
hom es o f tax officials.
T he thinness o f Old Regim e tax adm inistration m eant that it did not reach
inside the village. For the m ajor direct tax, the taille, in large parts o f
France, village collectors w ere appointed from a list o f eligible villagers, a
task so unrewarding that to be listed was a mark o f low status indeed.67 In
67. Marcel Marion, La impôts dincts sous Muden Régime, principalement au XVIIIe siècle
(Geneva: Siatldne-Megarioris Reprints, 1974), 5-8.
many parishes, then, there was no tax system to attack; one had to go to
tow n. M arching into tow n, how ever, was not only probably a longer walk
for many peasants, but m ight raise issues o f public order for the municipal
authorities. If this conjecture is accurate, m obilizations against national taxes
would have tended to involve peasants in confrontation with local authorities,
w ho w ere not keen on ceding the streets to country people com e to break
into a salt depot or tax cou rt This might help explain w hy so many conflicts
brought in these authorities (kxrfc ahead to Table 5 .5 ). Apart from the tow n
leadership, peasants m ight have feared the attitudes o f municipal populations
m ore generally.
M uch o f peasant participation in anti-tax incidents, m oreover, involved
them in even ts in which urban populations also took part, often the predom i
nant p a rt On July 18, 1789, for exam ple, the tow n council o f Féronne in
Picardy reported that “a large num ber o f country people and som e w orkers
and apprentices from tow n” w recked the tax office and drove out the
em ployees.6869The sense o f rural-urban solidarity against taxes produced by
such events over the next year in Picardy w as evident in a report cm the
dism al tax-collection situation there that the controller-general delivered to
the National A ssem bly on June 30, 1790. H e described, for exam ple, an
incident on April 30, 1790, in the tow n o f Ham in which innkeepers and
butchers subject to the aides w ere ordered to pay; he reported that m ost o f
the assem bled shopkeepers responded that they would refu se as long as
others did and that, in nearby tow ns and even m ore so in the countryside,
innkeepers and others w ere refusing to subm it (A P 16:584). O ne will not
find many accounts o f country-dw ellers storm ing into tow n to bum dow n tax
headquarters that suggest that such events took place against a background
o f a passive urban population. In short, I am suggesting that m uch o f the
open anti-tax actions o f peasants required urban allies. If th ese suggestions
are accepted, it follow s that publicly announcing a collective intention not to
pay, or physically im peding the collector (or higher authority) in the perform
ance o f his duties, becam e m ore com m on in the taxation arena because the
m ore aggressive descent on a tow n was a m ore difficult p roject than invading
an ecclesiastical institution or seigneurial hom e.
This series o f surm ises also suggests that rural-urban divisions, which
have achieved much prom inence o f late,60 need to be rethought. Country
people and urban elites (including revolutionary elites) often view ed one
another with hostility; som e country people and som e am ong the urban
68. See G. Ramon, La Révolution à Pérorme: Dvisiime série (1789-1791) (Férorme: J. Quentin,
ad.), 11-12.
69. The recent discussion seems to have been initiated by Tilly, The Vendée(Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1964), Bois, ñysans de l’Ouest: Des structures économiques et sociales aux options
politiques depuis l'époque révolutionnaire dans la Sarthe (Le Mans: Imprimerie M. Vüaire, 1960),
and Cobban, SocialInterpretation.
T he French Countryside, 1788-1793 239
low er strata m ay have differed shandy and antagonistically on all m anner o f

policies— food policy, first and forem ost Yet the evidence o f urban riots
with urban and rural participant-m ixes, at least in anti-tax and subsistence
even ts, show s som e capacity for cooperation, too.
A s fix: the target o f the anti-tax actions, w e note how m uch m ore
significant w ere the indirect than the direct taxes, in parallel with the
substantially greater hostility shown in the cahiers (see Chapter 3 ). This is
in accord with the data o f M arcel M arion, which show a severe decline in
collection o f direct taxes, but an even m ore severe failoff for the in d irect70
T he bitter sen se o f many cahiers that the indirect taxes, like the seigneurial
rights, w ere destined for private hands rather than public purposes is
som etim es d ea r in the insurrectionary m ilieu. C ontroller-G eneral Lam bert
w as struck by a statem ent o f som e innkeepers o f R oye on their resistance
to the aides: “ W e will die before yielding to nourishing with the fruit o f our
labors the revolting idleness o f the vam pires w ho prey upon the people”
(AP 16:583). Peasant petitions to the National A ssem bly, in Bryant Ragan's
analysis o f rural Picardy, also urged reform o f direct taxation, in contrast
with the fundamentally illegitim ate character o f the indirect, which w ere
challenged instead by collective violen ce.71
This focu s on the indirect taxes in insurrectionary action and in dem and
making alike is all the m ore notew orthy when one considers that the m ajor
target o f the great anti-tax risings o f the previous century w ere the new
direct taxes im posed by the new ly vigorous state fiscal bureaucracy. Indeed,
Le R oy Ladurie has cogently argued that one o f the postrevolt m echanism s
by which the state m ade peace in the countryside w as to back away from
the direct taxes in favor o f the indirect (a history to be repeated by
the revolutionary regim es— and the contem porary Fifth Republic, for that
m atter). Indirect taxes accounted for 24% o f revenues in the 1640s and
17% in the 1650s, but averaged betw een 42% and 50% in the eighteenth
century.72
The indirect taxes w ere not only hated but pervasive: there w ere greater
efforts needed for their surreptitious avoidance. The direct taxes tended to
be collected by particular agents o f the state or, as in the case o f the taille,
by unfortunate villagers dragooned into a tax-collector role at periodic
70. Marcel Marion, “Le Recouvrement des knpAtsen 1790,” RevueHistorique 121 (1916): 1-47.
This, incidentally, constitutes some welcome evidence for the validity of our anti-tax category, one
of the more problematic of our types of insurrection from the point of view of data quality.
71. Bryant T. Ragan Jr., “Rural Political Activism and Fiscal Equality in the Revolutionary
Somme,” in Bryant T. RaganJr. and Elizabeth Williams, eds., RecreatingAuthority m Revolutionary
France (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1992), 40.
72. Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, “Révoltes et contestations rurales en France de 1675 à 1788,"
Annales: Economies, Sociétés, Civilisations 29 (1974), 8; Yves Durand, Les fermiers-généraux au
fCillle siècle (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1971), 57.
intervals. T he collection act, then, cam e to the village from the outside and
at infrequent and predictable intervals. If one hid on eself or one’s valuables
at those tim es, perhaps the direct tax system would leave one in peace for
a w hile, especially under the confusions and hesitations o f the Revolution.
T he indirect system , on the other hand, pervaded daily life: one paid when
one m arried; when (Hie acquired or disposed o f land; when one brought
goods across the innum erable custom s barriers; when one purchased all
manner o f things, starting with alcoholic beverages.
And the indirect system didn’t chase after one; a person entered its
clutches in the cou rse o f pursuing other activities to which it had attached
itself. To be sure, evasion was possible as w idespread salt-sm uggling show s;
but the risks w ere continual and had to b e continually re-em braced. Even
under revolutionary circum stances, sim ple evasion may have seem ed a less
definitive tactic than it w as for the direct taxes. G enerations o f successful
salt-sm uggling had not brought the governm ent to abandon the gabelle.
The indirect tax system ’s very pervasiveness, then, meant innum erable
opportunities at which those caught up in the sense o f possibility opened by
the Revolution w ere continually redrawn by their everyday activities into the
w orld o f indirect taxes: an explosive potential, that, it appears, frequently
exploded.73
Attacks on Authorities
Our data include other challenges to state authority. W ith a bit o f gen erosity,
one m ight include virtually every ev en t I include here under the notion o f
“ attacks on authorities” only events in which the persons or property o f
officials o f national, regional, or local governm ents are injured. If villagers
storm into tow n and sack the headquarters o f the adm inistration o f the aides
it doesn’t count here; if they sack the hom e o f the director, it d oes. Such
m ovem ents w ere often by-products o f other sorts o f con flict a prisoner
73. Babeuf's career as a championof a radical conception of the rights of the people was launched
in the struggle over the tax on alcoholic drink, the aides, mPicardy in 1790. In explaining Babeufs
arrest to the National Assembly, the controller-general felt he need do no more than present an
excerpt from a speech of Babeufs against the aides to the effect that “if the entire National
Assembly were oppressive, it would be necessary to resist that oppression, that is one of the rights
of man . . . that the right of veto belongs to the people alone" (AP 16:583). See R. B.
Rose, Gracckus Babeuf: The First Revolutionary Communist (Stanford: Stanford University Press,
1978), 54-71.
T he F rench C ountryside , 1788-1793 241
seized fo r antiseigneurial action— or antichurch or subsistence or anti-tax

action— m ight trigger a m assive assault on the local jail, police, m ilitary
forces, or even the local governm ent; late in our period, a significant w ave
o f anticonscription actions developed, with a very significant com ponent
contributed by peasants with little inclination to fight far away. And, then, o f
cou rse, there w ere subsistence actions in which local, departm ental, or
even national authorities m ight be assailed to try to force them to do
som ething about the food situation. Table 5.5 show s that a substantial
proportion o f these events involved clashes with the forces o f order. For
only a m inority o f such incidents was I able to classify the authorities under
attack as “national,” “ local,” or som ething in betw een. O f such incidents,
how ever, it seem s w orthy o f note that the local level o f authority bore the
brunt o f the attacks.747
5
D oes this suggest a certain boundedness to the political horizons o f the
people o f the countryside, rather along the lines proposed by Eugen W eber?
W eber argued, in Peasants into Frenchmen,7* that it was not until the late
nineteenth century that peasants began to acquire a genuine sen se o f
involvem ent in the nation beyond their parish. We have argued, how ever,
that the cahiers already show ed a broader view (see Chapter 3 ). Perhaps
the resolution lies in the degree to which local officials w ere ultim ately those
responsible for carrying out nationally decided policies. It was local officials
w ho bent to the will o f the crow d in hard tim es to avert a food riot or w ho
stuck to the principles on which physiocratic theorists advised controllers
general and shaped the view s o f revolutionary legislators; it was local
officials w ho let pass a priest’s qualified yes in response to the demand for
an oath on the Civil Constitution o f the C lergy or w ho upheld the letter o f
74. An example: On Mardi 25, 1789, a large group of peasants in town for several of the
assemblies being convened in Aix as part of the elections for the Estates-General, joined townspeo
ple in demanding reduced prices on grain and bread as well as decrying the taxes the town levied
on such foodstuffs. When a high town official tried to get them to go back to their proper electoral
activities, throwing them some coins, insults, and threats, the crowd responded with shouts and
stones. The arrival oí some fifty soldiers, far from restoring order, enlarged the battle, which lasted
long into the night, left several dead and wounded and saw the public granaries ransacked (as well
as the stocks of local merchants) after which the military commander set prices and suspended
taxes on foodstufts as the town officials had not The longer-term fallout included a number of
arrests with one death sentence (the other arrestees were amnestied in August); and the formation
of a sizable anti-riot town militia large enough that one official claimed anunbelievable four thousand
recruits (the entire population of Aix was twenty-five thousand). TWo days after the violence began
a group of nobles, who like the country people were involved in the elections, announced their
advocacy of anend to their own tax privileges. See Monique Cubells, “L’émeute du 25 mars 1789 à
Aix-en-Provence," in Jean Nicolas, ed., Mouvements populaires et conscience sociale, XVIe-XIXe
siicles (Paris: Makñie, 1985), 401-8.
75. Eugen Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France, 1870-1914
Tfeble 5 .5 . Types o f Anti-authority Events
Type o f Event Proportion Proportion

(Fine Categories) o f Events d Bailliages
Attacks on persons or property:

By sphere o f competence
Taxation officials 18 31
Officials (other than taxation) 61 69
Officials concerned with subsistence 14 26
Forces o f order (police, military, National Guard) 29 48
By geographic span
Local officials 21 26
District or department officials 4 8
National officials 12 17
Note: Authority « administrative agents of central, regional, or local government and judges
(including police and military forces).
the law and called that a n o.76 In this environm ent, a forcefu l figure like
Babeuf could use anti-tax sentim ent as a basis on which to m obilize people
against local governm ents.77
Subsistence Events
T h ese are a m ajor category in them selves. Issues over food supply w ere a
staple form o f conflict all over W estern E urope.78 In our data such even ts
constitute one-fourth o f all events and are actually m ore w idespread than
antiseigneurial even ts (or even than the broader antifeudal category). T V o-
thirds o f tum ultuous bailliages saw som e form o f conflict over food (and
m ore than half o f all bailliages in the country). Indeed, if w e w ere to regard
the subsistence disturbances o f 1788-93 as an aggregate, they would
probably constitute the largest w ave o f food riots up to that m om ent in
French history (and in W estern European history, for that m atter).79 And
76. On local variation in refusing to accept anything short of an unconditional yes, see Timothy
Tackett, “The West in France in 1789; The Religious Factor in the Origins of the Counter-
Revolution,’’ Journal ofModem History 32 (1990): 413-54. See also Bernard Ptongeron, Conscience
religieuse en Révolution. Regards sur Htistoriographie religieuse de la Révolution française (Paris;
Picard, 1969), 30-31.
77. R. B. Rose, “Tax Revolt and Popular Organization.”
78. Charles T9y, “Food Supply and Public Order in Modem Europe,” in Charles TOly, ed..
The Formation of National States in Western Europe (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1975), 380-455.
79. The results of a comparative enumeration of early modem food riots by John Bohstedt,
Cynthia Bouton, and Manfred Gaihis show that eighteenth-century French events outnumber
when w e consider that the econom ic liberalism that dism antled the Old
R egim e's controls in 1789-91 w as succeeded by the m ost system atic price
controls in the country’s history, w e m ight w ell see this greatest o f
subsistence m ovem ents as uniquely effective— if only tem porarily— in ob
taining policy shifts.
Subsistence actions existed in many traditional form s, som e highly ritual
ized. Our data suggest these traditions w ere doing quite w ell in the
Revolution. Table 5 .6 show s that the transportation o f grain w as a very
traditional locus o f conflict that was thriving under the Revolution. For the
hungry to see grain transported through their turf to som ew here else was
w ell-nigh intolerable and therefore socially explosive (in grim counterpoint
to the equally hungry o ff the beaten track w ho perhaps quietly starved).00
W hen w e are considering rural participants and grain o f local origin, w e may
have the added poignancy o f the sight o f the very grain they helped plant
and harvest going elsew here, but our data do not lend them selves to
distinguishing the pillage o f grain convoys o f local origin from assaults mi
shipm ents ju st passing through. Reason could w ell add to an ger the
involvem ent o f distant claim ants mi scarce grain, the profit-seeking search
o f m erchants for m ore lucrative and som etim es distant m arkets and the
efforts o f the state to feed soldiers and dangerous urban populations could
easily be understood to be the very sou rces o f local scarcity. The very
effort o f the governm ent to control the flow o f grain in order to lim it the
threat o f scarcities associated the governm ent w ith those scarcities.01 This
p rocess w as som etim es reflected in rum ors that governm ent officials, along
with m erchants or large grain-grow ers, w ere deliberately hoarding grain to
drive prices up.02 Champions o f laissez-faire and o f paternalistic regulation *8
2
1
0
English ones and that German food rioting hardly began before the tad end of the century. Wide
the comparison of enumerations using distinct methodologies is hazardous, our figures here for the
(evolutionary period dwarf other French riot waves. (See Cynthia Bouton, "Regions and Regional
ism: The Case of France,” paper presented to the meetings of the American Historical Association,
SanFrancisco, 1994.)
80. This argument has been wel developed by Louise Tly, “The Food Riot as a Formof Political
Conflict in France,"Journal ofInterdisciplinaryHistory 3 (1971): 23-57. For some statistical support
from the period of the Old Regime’s collapse, see John Markoff, "Contexts and Forms of Rural
Revolt France in 1789,"Journal ofConflict Resolution 30 (1986): 253-90.
81. Steven L Kaplan, The Famine Plot ftrsuasion m Eighteenth-Century France (Philadelphia:
American Philosophical Society, 1982).
82. The usual approach to these rumors is to take them at face value; that is, as statements
actualy believed by the French (although often doubted or denied by the historian). Since the
existence of such rumors could be assimilated to the image of anunenlightened peasantry led astray
by a malicious minority, it was surely safer for ignorant peasants to riot on behalf of such a rumor
than for dear-thinking peasants to riot on behalf of an openly expressed and rationally developed
critique of government policy. The authories’ greatest moral condemnation could then be reserved
for those who sowed rumors (who could never be found) rather than those held to believe them.
When irrational rumors may serve to ward off charges of sedition, one may wonder whether every
alike tended to see scarcities as socially caused and therefore rem ediable by
appropriate legislation;83 the hungry also experienced hunger as socially
rooted rather than an act o f G od, but engaged in direct action rather than in
lobbying legislators.84
Such events, around m ajor roads, navigable river and canals, or tow ns at
the junction o f transportation arteries, occasioned the m assive blockage o f
the convoy, the seizure o f the grain, and pitched battles with the con voys'
arm ed e sco rts.85 The m arketplace was another classical locale for subsis
ten ce disturbances, bringing together as it did many conflicting interests
that w ere profoundly exaggerated in hard tim es. M arket disturbances,
indeed, are even m ore com m on than attacks on transported grain.86 Is this
one of those rioters who proclaims a belief in such stories actualy gives them an unreserved
credence. When the existence of such rumors leads the policeman, like the historian, to see peasant
unreason, it becomes the height of rationality to claimto act on the rumor.
83. This is a central theme in the great work of Steven Kaplan, Bread, Prüdes and ñtüdcal
Economy in the Reign of Louis XV (The Hague: Martinis Nghoff, 1976); Famine Plot frrsuasion;
ProvisioningParis (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984).
84. Anyone who writes on subsistence events is indebted to a recent and rich literature. Apart
from work already dted, this literature includes: R. B. Rose, “Eighteenth-Century Price Riots, the
French Revolution and the Jacobin Maximum,“ International Review of Social History 4 (1959):
432-41; George Rudé, “La Taxation populaire de mai 1775 à Paris et dans la région parisienne,”
Annotes Historiques de la Révolution Française 28 (1956); E. P. Thompson, “The Moral Economy
of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century,” Past and Present 50 (1971): 71-136; Hilton Root,
“Politiques frumentaires et violence collective en Europe au XVÜIe siècle,” Armales: Economies,
Sociétés, Civilisations 45 (1990): 167-89; Cynthia A Bouton, “Les victimes de la violence populaire
pendant la guerre des farines (1775),” mJean Nicolas, ed., Mouvements populaires et conscience
sociale, XVIe-XIXe siècles (Paris: Maloine, 1985), 391-99; Guy Lemarchand, “Les troubles de
subsistances dans la généralité de Rouen (seconde moitié du XVÜIe siècle),” Annales Historiques
de la Révolution Française 35 (1963): 401-27; William M. Reddy, “The Textile Hade and the
Language of the Crowd at Rouen, 1752-1871,” Pest andPresent 74 (1977): 62-89.
85. An anxious report to the Legislative Assembly on February 18, 1792, speaks of towns
surrounded by gatherings of country people ( = “brigands”) threatening to block the movement of
goods. The speaker is particularly worried because now, with war threatening, so many troops are
needed at the frontiers that the only force available to keep open the grain market is “the national
guards, that is to say, the people themselves” (AP 38:620).
86. If the secondary literature on which Louise Tilly based her account of the history of
subsistence events is to be credited, the blockage of transported grain seemed to have become the
most numerous form of such events, a pattern that still held good on the eve of the Revolution.
Why, then, does my data give pride of place to market disturbances? Assuming her data and mine
are both reasonably reliable on the relative frequencies of blockages and market disturbances, I
offer a hypothesis: The general breakdown of authority in the countryside made the transregional
shipment of gram an extremely hazardous proposition. Consider the analogy of Anglo-American
naval efforts to supply Britain and Russia in World War 0. These efforts led to the escorted convoy
to counter U-boats. Is it possible that town governments and Parisian commissmns fought their
own version of the battle of the Atlantic by organizing fewer but larger grain shipments, optimizing
the use of such protective military force as they could spare? If so, the result would be fewer
occasions for blockage and a higher proportion of these occasions made more risky by virtue of
adequate armed escort Gconcede this is the purest speculation.) See Louise Tily, “The Food Riot
Ih b le 5 .6 . Types o f Subsistence Events
Type o f Event Percentage o f Percentage o f

Action directed at strategie points in market process

Transportation o f grain blocked; land or river
convoys attacked; grain purchases prevented;
grain in transit seized (sometimes accompanied
by price-setting) 18% 38%
Marketplace invaded; grain, bread, or flour seized;
coerced price control in marketplace 29 49
Authorities asked to intervene in provisioning or
pricing o f food; authorities, persons or property
attacked for failing to do so 6 15
Searches and seizures o f stocks
Lord’s stock o f food or drink seized; lord compelled
to feed crowd; lord’s game hunted, his privileged
animals (rabbits, pigeons, fish) seized; lord’s
fruit seized 10 20
Monastery’s stocks o f food or drink seized; crowd
feasts at monastery; fruit from monastic orchard
seized 2 7
Food sought or seized from source other than lord
or monastery; public warehouses broken into;
domiciliary visits; raids on noble or bourgeois
stocks; seizure o f harvested gram (including
seizures from prosperous peasants) 10 22
All searches and seizures 22 38
Retribution against the culpable
Violence against persons or property o f those held
responsible for shortages: government officials,
hoarders, merchants, grain speculators, millers,
peasants withholding grain from market, peasants
resisting price controls 8 25
because the m arket was a fixed rather than a m oving target?87 M arkets
w ere held on fixed days at fixed sites while transported grain required
advance intelligence or lucky sightings as w ell as rapid m obilization to
constitute a prom ising opportunity. (The frequency o f attacks on m oving
as Political Conflict,” SO. It is worth noting that the largest wave of prerevolutionary subsistence
disturbances, the Flour Warof 1775, also hadanatypically low proportion of blockages compared to
market disturbances; see Cynthia Bouton, The Flour War: Gender, Class and Community m Late
Ancien Régime Society (University Parle Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993), 141.
87. A spectacular cluster of such events took place in November and December 1792 as
enormous bands (from several hundred to several thousand strong) went from one marketplace to
another, recruiting participants to join them for a day’s march as they traveled across some eight
departments around Maine. See Michel \fovefle, Viiie et campagne au XVlIIe siècle: Chartres et la
Beauce (Paris: Editions Sociales, 1980), 245-53.
con voys is eloquent testim ony to the rapidity with which French peasants
could m obilize.)
In these urban m arketplaces w e find crow ds (often including rural partici
pants and even rural invaders) w ho seized grain or flour or bread; w ho
insisted that the authorities control the price; w ho, the authorities in default,
im posed that price them selves (m eaning in practice that m illers, bakers,
w ell-off peasant sellers w ere threatened with injury— or w orse— if they
attem pted to charge m ore than the crow d dem anded). Searches and seizures
w ere another tim e-honored response: crow ds m ight break into municipal
granaries and w arehouses® or m ight carry out a dreaded “ visit”— the
invasion o f the hom es o f the w ell-off by poor people seeking food. Such
dom iciliary visits troubled many a noble or bourgeois hom e in tow n and
many a farm hom e o f a w ell-to-do peasant proprietor. In a related tactic,
harvested grain w as at risk from hungry people, how ever and w herever
stored.
Som e o f these actions w ere quite likely to generate violen ce, particularly
if resisted, but that is only a portion o f the violence that hung over such
events. In a m oral clim ate in which hunger was understood as a social
creation, the persons held responsible m ight w ell be the targets o f an ger
perhaps a peasant w ho was believed (som etim es accurately) to be withhold
ing grain from the m arket, perhaps a speculative (or a m erely cautious)
hoarder, perhaps a baker or a m iller or a m erchant m ight find him self in
great danger, all the m ore so if such a person was resisting a m ovem ent for
am trolling prices. And, perhaps particularly attractive in a clim ate o f grow ing
assaults on the attributes o f the lords, lay and clerical alike, the local château
or m onastery was a good spot to visit if one sought food,® or sought those
suspected o f withholding from the m arketplace until prices rose still further.
Rural visits unconnected to m arket disturbances or blockages, how ever,
seem a tradition o f very recen t vintage, according to Cynthia B outon's
m eticulous dissection o f the changing structure o f subsistence con flicts. She
sees the Flour War o f 1775, in which such events w ere (atraditionally)8 9
88. A tempting target in towns at the center of regional export networks was the private storage
room rented by agrainexporter prior to forming the export convoy; æe Bouton, Flour War, chap. 4.
89. As I have only considered measures to secure food as subsistence events, Table 5.6 includes
the seizure of the lord’s stocks but not their destruction, a class of actions that I discussed under
the general antiseigneurial category above (ditto for monastic or other stocks). It may weO be that
the scattering of grain on the ground, while sometimes genuinely one such destructive act, was at
other times intended to make some food available for those too poor to pay at even the coerced just
price that so many accounts report those seizing food stocks to opt for. At a time of acute social
conflict, such an act has perhaps the added appeal of pointing up the failure of lord, monastery, or
wealthy landholder to provide for the poor. Cynthia Bouton noted actions of this sort in the Hour
war” of 1775; see her M L’économie morale et la guerre des farines de 1775,” in Florence Gauthier
and Guy-Robert Deni, eds., La Guerre du Blé au XVIIIe siècle: La critique populaire contre le
libéralisme économique au XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Les Editions de la Passion, 1988), 99.
num erous as a step tow ard going beyond the structure o f distribution— in
which the state w as im plicated— to the structure o f production, in which the
château and even the storage facilities o f larger landow ners o f all varieties
w ere targets.90
H er research on the great Flour War that follow ed the governm ent’s
decontrol o f the gram trade in 1775 offers the intriguing suggestion that an
enhanced participation o f rural people in seizing grain at likely rural sites in
the later eighteenth century— w hether m onastery, w ealthy peasant’s place,
or château— w as a sort o f contestatory bridge betw een what w e m ay call
the traditional form s o f subsistence action and the antiseigneurial storm s
ahead. Bouton points out that from the point that developing state con trols
began to system atically trigger subsistence events91 the usual form s w ere
the m arket invasion and the blockage: the first essentially urban, the secon d
often so; the participants w ere often wom en, gathered for m arket activity.
B y the late eighteenth century, how ever, a m ore rural and m ore m ale
practice was developing in which grain was seized in the countryside before
it got to m arket, a shift that brought an antiseigneurial (but also antim onastic
and anti-prosperous-peasant) elem ent into play. T h ese rural m en w ere
largely w age-w orkers in dom estic industries or agricultural day-laborers.
B outon's suggestion is that the new form o f subsistence event w as the
outgrow th o f the social polarization that w as part o f the general syndrom e
o f rising urban and rural populations, rising grain prices, and falling real
w ages for laborers but rising profits for large grain-producers. This shift
was reflected by adding a new cluster o f actions to the classical form s o f
subsistence struggle. The traditional attacks on various interm ediaries
(m illers, m erchants, m arket-vendors, police, ju dges) w as now joined by the
direct attack by the losers on the winners in the class polarizations at the
village leveL From the classic struggle to force the state to live up to (o r to
bring back) effective paternalism , the subsistence events w ere taking on, by
1775, the lines o f open and unmediated class co n flict92 The new er form s o f
conflict that Bouton found in the Flour War anticipate som e o f the dash es o f
the Revolution.
During the Revolution, our data show that antiseigneurial (and religious)
events w ere not only som etim es subsistence events. Even when the targets
90. Bouton, "Gendered Behavior in Subsistence Riots: The Flour War of 1775,"JournalofSocial
History 23 (1990): 735-54. Ado and Lemarchand also see the subsistence conflicts after midcentury
as steps toward taking on the lords and the church. See Ado, Kmtimskoe dvizhenie, 72, and
Lemarchand, “Troubles de subsistances,” 412-13.
91. Since market disturbances of varying scales are quite old, a precise date is difficult Louise
Tffly suggests the 1690s as the time when “widespread food riots, involving large numbers of
people” began; see "The Food Riot as Political Conflict,” 24.
92. Bouton, “Gendered Behavior in Subsistence Riots,” and “Economie morale et guerre des
farines,” 93-110.
could be clearly differentiated, there m ight be a com m on language o f

contention. The people w ho set up a gallow s in the m arketplace at ChemiHé,
presum ably to deter hoarders, late in August 1790 m ade use o f an idiom
m ore com m only deployed before the château.w If subsistence disturbances
could borrow an antiseigneurial language, the reverse w as true as w ell
Som e o f the peasant participants in the Flour War w ere breaking into hom es
and interrupting their search for grain long enough to drink their vic
tim’s w ine,9* a m ockingly coerced invocation o f hospitality (and a m ocking
sacram ent as w ell?) that was w idely taken up in antiseigneurial actions in
the 1790s.
For all their grip on p eop le's minds in the eighteenth century, how ever,
notice how the num ber o f subsistence events involving vengeance upon
personifications o f the shortages— specific hoarders, profiteers, e tc.— is
hardly enorm ous (8 % ).9 95 And much o f the violence tow ard persons arises
4
9
3
not out o f a crow d’s rough ju stice, but from the resistance o f this m iller,
that m erchant, or thus-and-such official to crow d dem ands about availability
or price. H ow ever often som e am ong the country people repeated rum ors
o f personal and deliberate profiteering by business interests with the
collusion o f governm ent officials, these country people nonetheless directed
m ost o f their actions tow ard very plausible sou rces o f food. Venting anger
upon the culpable is, by com parison, a relatively small part o f the agenda o f
contentious gatherings (although hardly a small m atter to the targets). N ote
the sim ilarity with the low frequency o f personal violen ce in antiseigneurial
events and the profound contrast with the clashes surrounding the revolu
tionary reorganization o f the church.
Colin Lucas has recently em phasized the them e o f personal violen ce in
an im portant new interpretation o f revolutionary crow ds.96 He takes the
personification o f the bad as an elem ent o f a “ traditional” sen se o f the
crow d. This traditional crow d may fill in for a governm ent derelict in its
responsibility for provisioning tow ns97 or for providing ju stice: a crow d that
93. See Port, Vendit angevine, 1:99.

94. Bouton, "Les victimes de la violence populaire," 393.
95. By way of confirmation, note that Cynthia Bouton finds violence against persons relatively
rare in food riots generally. In the Flour War of 1775 only 2% of those arrested were accused of
violence against another person (flour War, chap. 4). lam Cameron also finds violence against
persons in subsistence events to be remarkably low in pre-Revolutionary Périgord (Crime and
Repression, 240-41).
96. Cohn Lucas, “The Crowd and Politics,” in Colin Lucas, ed., The French Revolution and the
Creation ofModem ñ>lidcal Culture, voL 2, TheMidcal Culture of the French Revolution (Oxford:
Pergamon Press, 1988), 259-85.
97. Thus Louise Tilly has argued that it is only from late in the seventeenth century that the
classical forms of subsistence events flourished in France. As the government backed off from
blocking exports, the popular blockages multiplied; as the government began to deregulate prices,
may punish individual w rongdoers and even resist unjust officials. Yet the
traditional crow d is one that experiences its ow n occupation o f public space,
w hether the village square or the Place de G rève in Paris, as tem porary.
The crow d will soon enough, it know s, disperse; the king’s pow er will again
flow back into its usual abodes. Lucas finds it particularly significant that
such personalized antiseigneurial violence was highly selective and cites a
num ber o f instances o f lords in the Rhône valley w ho com bined extrem e
abuse o f their peasants before 1789 with im prudent action th ereafter.989In
the sam e vein one could refer to G eorges L efebvre’s great account o f “ the
m urder o f the count o f D am pierre.” This count for som e years not only had
particularly acrim onious dealings with his peasants, but was also visibly a
supporter o f the king as the unfortunate m onarch was being dragged back
to Paris follow ing the flight to V aren n es." The selectivity in such violen ce
persuades Lucas that the crow d action is not random frenzy, but follow s a
cod e o f ju stice. This is persuasive, but Lucas only explores crow d selectivity
in its ch oice o f whom to lynch. The study o f antiseigneurial even ts, o f
subsistence disturbances, o f antitax risings show s quite a different sort o f
selectivity as w ell, one in which a personalized approach to conflict turns out
to characterize only a small m inority o f even ts.100 (Indeed it seem s to be the
case in Lucas’s ow n evidence; the few dram atic cases o f retribution against
his Rhône valley lords stand out against a background o f a different pattern
in m ost antiseigneurial even ts.) The overall pattern o f events suggests a
crow d w ith a much m ore abstract conception o f social structures than even
Lucas allow s. N or did it take the revolutionary m obilization to educate or
m odernize the country people, at least not in these w ays. T he parish
cahiers, w e may recall, show us a peasantry at the very beginning o f the
Revolution, already im bued with a sense o f unjust institutions and not ju st
unjust individuals (see Chapter 3 ). Their view s o f seigneurial rights and
taxation show ed us a sen se o f a socially instituted and therefore socially
m odifiable system ; not a collection o f individually oppressive lords and tax
collectors. In term s o f our insurrection data, what stands out as unusual, in
fact, is precisely the personification o f the great religious con flicts, particu
larly on ce the Civil Constitution becom es the issue.
so coercively imposed popular price-setting arose. See Louise Tilly, “Food Riot as Political
Conflict.” 47-52.
96. Ibid., 269.
99. Georges Lefebvre, HLe meurtre du comte de Dampierre (22 juin 1791)” in Etudes sur ht
Révolutionfrançaise (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1963), 393-405.
100. Simon Schama notices this selectivity for the summer of 1789 (“there were remarkably few
fatalities”), but doesn’t pause in his depiction of horrors to try to explain the remarkable (Schama,
Citizens, 433).
Wage Conflicts
If prices w ere the spur to econom ic conflict in prem odern E urope, w ages
are that spur in the proletarianized w orld o f the p resen t. A natoly A do
suggested that w age conflicts w ere already significant in the French country
side o f the revolutionary ep och .101 Prelim inary results o f the N icolas-
Lem archand study show (hat such conflicts constituted a small but noticeable
proportion o f rural events in the century preceding the R evolution.102
In som e areas w age con flict betw een harvest w orkers and rural em ployers
had becom e a w ell-institutionalized annual drama, in which plans w ere
developed and new s com m unicated at the local cabaret; organized bands o f
w orkers then recruited others to join them and frightened still others into
refusing to w ork. Clashes with the rural police often follow ed. T he bands o f
strikers grew out o f the w ork-gangs with which one often had to affiliate to
get hired; w ork-gangs in turn w ere often form ed around m igrant laborers,
linked by kinship or sharing a com m on regional dialect. T he w ork-gang
chiefs seem to have been country people with som e experience o f a w orld
away from the village, acquired in tow n or m ilitary serv ice.103 A w orried
revolutionary governm ent, as early as Septem ber 1791, forbade rural
laborers to organize to press for higher w ages.104
I found som e 42 such w age events in m y data, but as a proportion o f all
form s o f rural conflict they account for under 1% o f all events and only occu r
in a small num ber o f bailliages. The significance o f price issues com pared to
w age issues suggests the Revolution to be a period in which the m ajor
outlines o f class struggle w ere traditional
Land Conflicts
W hile rural class conflict only rarely took the form o f w age disputes,
how ever, m ore traditional struggles over land w ere far m ore num erous and
101. Ado, Krestianskoe dviehenie, 17.

102. Nicolas finds 5% of his incidents from 1661 to 1789 to be “labor conflicts,” a category very
dose in practice to the “wage conflict” used here (“Les émotions dans l'ordinateur”). Guy
Lemarchand shows the proportions of disturbances that involve wages to be growing in the
eighteenth century—it rises to about 6% of all incidents in the Nicobs-Lemarchand data set—but
this data includes urban incidents. See Lemarchand, "TVoubles populaires au XVUIe,” 37.
103. Jean-Marc Moriceau, "Les ‘Baccanals’ ou grèves de moissoneurs en pays de France
(seconde moitié du XVIIIe siècle)” inJean Nicolas, ed., Mouvementspopulaires et conscience sociak,
XVIe-XlXt siicles (Paris: Maloine, 1965), 421-34.
104. Thie to its prindpled freeing of the market, proprietors were forbidden to join together to
try to push wages downward. See Fernand Gerbaux and Charles Schmidt, Prods verbaux des
comités if agriculture et de commerce de la Constituante, de la Législative et de la Convention (Paris:
Imprimerie Nationale, 1906-10), 2:549.
took on many form s. M any o f these battles involved communal invasions o f

disputed turf: a field held to be communal property that had been illicitly
usurped by lord, m onastery, wealthy urbanite, or even prosperous peasant
(a far rarer target) m ight be occupied, with peasants show ing up to w ork
the land (if arable) or driving their animals to graze upon it if n o t A ssociated
actions included the breaking o f fen ces (also appropriate when a relatively
prosperous landholder attem pted to rem ove his ow n holding from com munal
constraints even if possession o f the land was not in itself seen as illicit).
Pastures w ere one notable locale for such clashes and forests w ere a very
notable and m uch m ore num erous second.
Rights in the w ooded areas o f France w ere often the scen es o f com plex
and m any-sided disputes.1 106 A peasant com m unity might have long-standing
5
0
rights there: rights to graze animals, rights to collect fallen w ood, rights to
acorns (a valuable stopgap in hard tim es). Lords w ho w ished to clear m ore
land for planting and lords w ho w ished to hunt w ithout com petition from
poachers m ight over the years have w orked out som e form o f shaky
accom m odation with their peasants. In the late eighteenth century, how
ever, w ood prices w ere rising steeply as m ultiple uses for forest products
grew explosively. Urban grow th meant trem endous use o f w ood for the
construction boom and urban building entrepreneurs could pay top prices.
The developing m etal industries (all industry for that m atter) depended
heavily on w ood for fuel. The rural ironw orks o f A lsace, for exam ple,
consum ed charcoal, not coaL But if construction and forges bid up the
price o f w ood, so did the w orld struggle for im perial dom inion. A French
governm ent obsessed with com peting with Britain on the seas devoured
tim ber for ship construction. G overnm ent technocrats, indeed, attem pted
to insist (Hi a rational exploitation o f French w oodlands to prevent the
depletion o f an essential strategic m aterial W ith all this interest, prices
soared: and secular lords, urban proprietors, and m onastic landlords alike
strained to break their traditional deals with peasant com m unities in order
to fully appropriate the w ooded areas. N or did country people lim it them
selves to the defense o f traditional claim s. The location o f conflict, Andrée
C orvol has show n, w as shifting during the eighteenth century from com m u
nal w oods to royal forests and the infractions o f the country people w ere
becom ing less oriented to dom estic provision and m ore to m arket opportuni
105. Andrée Corvol, “Forêt et communauté» en basse Bourgogne au dix-buitième aède,"

Revue Historique 256 (1976): 15-36; "Les dé&nquences forestières en basse-Bourgogne depuis la
réformation de 1711-1718,” Revue Historique 259 (1978): 345-88; and L'homme au bois: Histoire
des relations de Hümme et de la forit (XVHe-XXe siècles) (Paris: Fayard, 1987); Christian Desplat,
"La forêt béarnaise du XVIIIe siècle,” Atmales de Midi 85 (1973): 147-71; Saint-Jacob, Paysans de
la Bourgogne du Nord, 488-90 and passim; Guy Lemarchand, “Ws de bois et braconnage dans la
généralité de Rouen au XVIIIe siècle," in Jean Nicolas, ed., Mouvements populaires et conscience
sociale, XVIe-XIXe siècles (Paris: Maloine, 1985). 229-39.
tie s.106 A s a result the governm ent’s forestry program increasingly allocated
resou rces to control illegal grazing, pilfering, and other violations o f law .107
Grazing land com peted with the forests as a location for con flict In the
struggle for pasture, a large stockraiser could profit by producing m eat for
grow ing urban and m ilitary populations, leather and horses for the m ilitary,
and animal fat for a variety o f industrial uses— but only if a m ore absolute
claim to that pasture could win out over the claim s o f peasant sm allholders
and the landless to traditional rights to glean and to have their animals graze.
In the eighteenth century, enterprising lords som etim es con cocted new ly
profitable traditions in which their fellow s in regional judiciaries supported
them . One finds, for exam ple, lords renting out land still claim ed by peasant
com m unities to com m ercial stock-raisers, alm ost everyw here a violation o f
traditional understandings that the land was for the small and the great o f
the local com m unity alon e.108 Similarly, the lords w ere attem pting, m ore
and m ore, to seize the forests, in this case som ew hat restrained by
interm ittent royal support for conservationist m easures. And ju st as the
peasants used the opportunity presented by the general collapse o f effective
repression to assert and reassert109 their claim s to the pastures, they let
their animals loose in the forests, flam boyantly organized m ass cuttings o f
w ood and, when that was too dangerous, carried on m assive and virtually
unstoppable surreptitious pilferings at night. Cutting dow n the trees the lord
106. Andrée Corvo!, L’homme et Xarbre sous XAncien Régime (Paris: Económica, 1984), 664-65.
107. Andrée Corvo!, "La coercition en milieu forestier,” m Jean Nicolas, ed., Mouvements
populaires et conscience sociale, XVIe-XIXe siècles (Paris: Maloine, 1985), 199-207.
108. In its cahier, the parish of Dotving in the bailliage of Uxheim complains of the commercial
stock-raisers to whom "contrary to the formal dispositions of the customary law of Lorraine and
contrary to the public good” the local lords have leased their grazing rights. The peasants argue
that as outsiders to the community these stock-raisers have no interest in caring for the land. In
the cause of transforming a traditionally defensible claim claim to one-third of communal resources
into an illegitimate source of rental income, the stock-raisers act with "inhumanity”: they insist that
the peasants make no more than double their own use of the grazing areas ("counting a horse or an
ox or a cow as four sheep”) and thereby force members of the community to get rid of either their
draft animals or their pigs. (P. Lesprand and L Bout, Cahiers de doléances des prévôtés baUliagères
de Sarrebourg et Phalsbourg et du baillqge de Uxheim pour les états généraux de 1789 (Metz:
Imprimerie Paul Even, 1938), 186.
109. Certainly the cahiers often speak of restoring a right encroached upon by a lord, by a
monastery—or by the Water and Forest Administration. Thus one community refers to the
permission granted to "his poor subjects” by a count 650 years ago to pasture their animals in the
forest, now forbidden by the local viscount ("Our monarch is no less generous and compassionate
than Count Renaud was in similar circumstances; they therefore hope for the same grace.”). See
Zoltan-Etienne Harsany, Cahiers des bailliages des généralités de Metz et de Nancy pour les états
généraux de 1789, ser. 1, voL 5, Cahiers du bailliage de Pont-à-Mousson (Paris: Librairie Paul
Hartmann, 1946), 120. The demand that something be reestablished or restored is far more
common with regard to communal rights than most other institutions. Of aOgrievances on other
subjects a minuscule 1% are calls to reestablish; when the subject is communal rights, however,
10% of demands are in this vein.
claim ed as his ow n, even without hauling them off, w as a conspicuous act

o f defiance.110
In disputes over ow nership and use rights, m oreover, w hether the setting
w as pasture or forest, rural com m unities endow ed with patience and access
to legal advice could press their claim s in court; the legal route may not
have yielded m uch satisfaction (and was beyond the reach o f p oor com muni
ties) but the encounter o f law yer and peasants in taking on the lords may
have been a m ajor focu s for the form ation o f an antiseigneurial discourse
m elded out o f the law yer's search for abstract principies o f law and the
villagers’ know ledge o f d etail W hen, to take up an Alpine exam ple, the
Com m ission Interm édiaire o f the Provincial E states in Dauphiné surveyed
social issues in early 1789, it found, within the present boundaries o f the
département o f D rôm e, som e half-dozen villages locked in legal com bat with
their lords over land u se.111
But disputes betw een peasant com m unities and the w ell-endow ed over
land use hardly exhausts the form s o f land conflict under the Revolution.
Peasant com m unities divided internally in com plex w ays on issues o f agrarian
individualism . W ere communal rights to fix the date o f the harvest, to
regulate technology, or to limit ow nership resou rces to be preserved— o r
w ere they fetters to be destroyed? T here has been a long-standing debate
on w hether communal rights o f various sorts (rights o f gleaning, o f pastur
age, o f com m on proprietorship, o f restrictions on technology) are to be
understood as primarily benefitting the richer or the p oorer m em bers o f the
com m unity.112 W hatever the precise w ay the rural com m unity threatened to
fragm ent over such questions, illegal divisions o f com m on land becam e one
o f the notew orthy form s o f rural land struggle under the Revolution,
am ounting to one-fourth o f our incidents o f land con flict Som etim es this
m ight be com bined with communal action against a large p rop rietor a field
w orked by the lord’s w age laborers, say, m ight be com munally seized, a
110. Marc Bloch, "La lutte pour l’individualisme agraire dans la France du XVŒe siècle,"
Armales ¿Histoire Economique et Sociale 2 (1930): 329-81, 511-56; Les caractères originaux de
fíustoin ruralefrançaise (Paris: Armand Cobn, 1968).
111. Jean Sauvageon, “Les cadres de la société rurale dans la Drôme à la fin de l’Ancien Régime:
survivances communautaires, survivances féodales et régime seigneurial," in Robert Chagny, Aux
origines provinciales de la Révolution, 39-40. See also CL Wolikow, “Communauté et féodalité:
Mouvements anti-féodaux dans le vignoble de Bar-sur-Seine, fin de l’Ancien Régime,” in Albert
Sobod, ed., Contributions à l’histoire paysanne de la Révolutionfrançaise (Paris: Editions Sociales,
1977), 283-308.
112. Georges Lefebvre, “La Révolution française et les paysans,” in his Etudes sur la Révolution
française (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1963), 338-67; Afcert Sobod, La Révolution
française (Paris: Gallimard, 1962), 1:61-63; Florence Gauthier, La voiepaysanne dans la Révolution
française: L’exemple de la Picardie (Paris: Maspero, 1977); Cobban, Social Interpretation; Ado,
Kresfianskoe dvixhenie, 192-93; Wtoa Root, Ptasants andKing in Burgundy:Agrarian Fbundations
ofFrenchAbsolutism (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1987).
traditional enough sort o f claim , particularly if it could be asserted that the

field in question really, authentically, was communal land to begin with that
had at som e identifiable point been usurped by the lord (or his father or
grandfather . . .). But when, as som etim es happened, the occupying
peasants divided up that land, they w ere drang som ething that appears a
good deal less traditional And som etim es, the illegal division took place
without being part and parcel o f collective action against an outsider. T here
are intracommunal disputes h ere, to o .113 (T here are also a small num ber o f
intercom m unal land dispu tes).114
Table 5 .7 show s the distributions o f these various w ays in which land was
con tested .115 O f the incidents w e found, the lion’s share g oes to conflicts
betw een the lord and the peasant com m unity. If w e join anti-ecclesiastical
land conflicts to antiseigneurial ones in an antifeudal category w e get alm ost
three-fifths o f our land conflicts. That land issues and the seigneurial regim e
w ere intertw ined would hardly have surprised France’s elites. We may recall
that w e saw that Third E state cahiers taking up issues o f land arrangem ents
not explicitly seigneurial— lease term s, condition o f purchase, landless
n ess— w ere also prone to consider the seigneurial regim e at greater length
(see Chapter 4, p. 178). Am ong “non-feudal” targets, the bulk are conflicts
am ong groups o f peasants them selves, generally within but, occasionally,
betw een com m unities. A surprisingly small num ber are over land ow ned by
113. Intracommunal struggles might be generated by revolutionary opportunities. In the Alpine

parish of Baronnies, for example, the sale of church land generated a struggle between what
appears to be a larger group committed to equal division of the property of the local priory and a
smaller group of the apparently better-off who got the land at auction. A long period of threats,
window-breaking, stolen seedlings, slaughtered animals, felled trees, fifes and drums, arrests and
military force followed. See Jean Nicolas, LaRévolutionfrançaise dans lesAIpes. Dauphiné etSavoie,
1789-1799 (Toulouse: Privat, 1989), 141-42.
114. Intercommunal conflicts, sometimes of long standing, could become entangled with positions
inrevolutionary politics. For some examples from afrontier region, see Michel Brunet, LeRoussillon
face à la Révolutionfrançaise (Perpignan: trabucaire, 1989), 96-98.
115. A striking aspect of land conflict is the virtual absence throughout the Revolution of seizures
of land as such, that is, as principled redistributions of property regarded as a self-justifying
measure. This absence is particularly striking when the actions of peasantries in other revolutionary
contexts is explored by way of searching for comparative benchmarks. It is impossible to think of
the countryside in the Russian, Mexican, or Chinese Revolutions without thinking of widespread
land seizures. But in France it is only usurped land that is seized; it is property that is already
communal that is targeted for illegal division and distribution. Indeed, often it is not even fill
ownership that is seized. When smallholders’ animals are driven over the just-destroyed fences
around land that the lord had defended against traditional village rights, we have the assertion of
communal claims to shared usage. If we turn from peasant action to legislative action, we find that
only the land of church and king (to which émigré land was later added) was to be redistributed.
There is no revolutionary legislation that aims to break up large estates as such and turn France’s
mkrofimdistas into minifiindistas, just as there is only the most limited move from below for
generalized land seizures. Even so, the fear that such a movement might emerge haunted the
revolutionary legislatures as the Revolution radicalized generally; see Chapter 8, p. 485.
urbanites. T h e land adm inistered by the revolutionary state itself, how ever,
seized from church and king and destined for sale, w as a rather m ore
significant, if still relatively small, ob ject o f dispute. (Perhaps it doesn’t fully
belong under the “non-feudal” rubric since much o f this land had belonged
to the church.) W hat is striking overall is the absence o f a grassroots
m ovem ent for breaking up large estates. It is the lord’s usurped land day
and ecclesiastic) that is to be seized (or perhaps reseized from the state) or
it is communal land (w hether usurped by a lord or not) that is to be divided
or differently used. In this resp ect, at any rate, the land m ovem ent d oes not
seem to fit very w ell within the rubric o f a rearguard action against a
nascent capitalism .116
S o many attem pts to seize food or control its price, so many land
invasions, so m uch tax resistance, and so little w age con flict Such a picture
is one o f a trem endous recrudescence o f traditional targets and strategies
o f conflict rather than the discovery o f new ones. Charles Tilly argues that
the dominant m odalities o f popular conflict in France rem ained within the
traditional form s w ell into the 1840s. It is only in that fifth decade o f the
nineteenth century, Tilly argues, that new er form s o f struggle begin to
eclipse the venerable patterns o f past cen tu ries.117 T here w as, in fact, an
Thble 5 .7 . Types o f Land Conflict
Type o f Event Percentage o f Percentage o f

Possessor o f disputed land:

“ Feudal"
Seigneurial 49% 58%
Ecclesiastical 10 24
Total feudal 59 67
“ Nonfeudal”
State 6 14
Urten bourgeois 1 2
Peasant (includes intracommunal
and intercommunal conflicts) 37 44
Total nonfeudal 43 50
Issue
Enclosures, fences 9 24
Rights in the forests 36 50
Division o f the commons 27 30
116. On the nix of “antifeudaT and “anticapitahst” clemente in the peasant movement, see
Chapter 7.
117. Charles THy. “How Protest Modernized mFrance, 1845-1855,” in W3ham0. Aydelotte,
Alan G. Bogue, and Robert Wiliam Foge! The Dimensions of Quantitative Research m History
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972), 192-255.
2S6 THE ABOLITION OF FEUDALISM
innovative side o f the Revolution’s contention, TiHy w rites elsew here, but
the revolutionary governm ents achieved rem arkable su ccess in harnessing,
controlling, channeling, and ultim ately taming these popular energies— so
that the Revolution failed to leave an innovative legacy as far as the form s o f
struggle are con cern ed.11' Our data cm the Revolution certainly show the
vitality o f traditional targets and tactics. But there is nothing very traditional
about the w eight o f antiseigneurial actions.
Counterrevolution
It w as hardly the case that all rural events had targets identifiable as the
beneficiaries o f the Old Regim e. O ften, indeed, it was the new er revolution
ary authorities w ho w ere under fire. Donald Sutherland has stressed the
polarizing aspect o f the Revolution, arguing that it divided French society in
tw o right from the beginning.1 119 In his treatm ent o f the background to the
8
1
explosion o f open and arm ed peasant counterrevolution that began in 1793,
Sutherland urges us to see the chouannerie first and forem ost as a d vfl w ar
within the countryside .120We can trace the rivulets o f tension that ultim ately
flow ed into the flood sparked by the em battled state’s attem pt to conscript
unwilling peasants to die far from hom e in defen se o f the new order.
W hen our tim e-fram e ends in June 1793 the m ilitary cam paigns o f the
counterrevolution w ere still running strong, so w e cannot trace the after-
math. (And m uch o f the military action is excluded by the way w e have
defined our even ts.) N onetheless, there is a good deal that w e can cou n t
Arguably, any form o f opposition to any governing authority from the
sum m er o f 1789 on m ight be labeled counterrevolutionary in the sense that
it constituted an actual or potential threat to the capacity o f the regim e to
m obilize resou rces to defend itself. The governm ent o f the m om ent m ight
w ell agree with such a categorization. H ow ever, many o f the m ost intense
sou rces o f opposition to the various governm ents cam e from groups plainly
com m itted to advancing the Revolution (at least the Revolution as they,
rather than the new elites, defined it). I do not want to confuse angry
peasants w ho feel their dem ands have not yet been m et (and therefore
118. See Charles Tüy, The Contentious French (Cambridge: Befcnap Press of Harvard Univer
sity Press, 1986), 388-89.
119. “The history of the entire period can be understood as the struggle against a counterrevolu-
tioa that was not so much aristocratic as it was massive, extensive, durable and popular”; see
Donald M. G. Sutherland, France, 1789-1815: Revolution and Counterrevolution (New Ybck: Oxford
120. Donald M. G. Sutherland, The Chouans: The Social Origins <4Popular Counter-Revolution
m UpperBrittany, 1770-1796 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982), 10.
dem and a m ore genuine abolition o f seigneuriatism than has yet occu rred)
with equally angry peasants w ho oppose the Revolution as such. W hen
M ichel Vovelle, very sensibly, speaks o f the “im possible map o f the counter
revolution,” 1211
2 he has in mind not so m uch the em pirical difficulties o f
establishing a map o f any specific sort o f events, form idible though these
difficulties may be, but rather the conceptual problem o f what sorts o f event
one ought to count. W ith an eye on the range o f popular resistance that took
place w ithout any linkage to avow edly counterrevolutionary elites, som e
scholars now offer the term “antirevohition. ”m W hat I shall mean here by
rural counterrevolutionary events will be th ose events that are either
accom panied by open counterrevolutionary sloganeering or that are directed
against central institutions that are distinctively revolutionary. I also re
garded as counterrevolutionary, events in which the w ord w as not used, if
adhesion to counterrevolution w as otherw ise clearly sym bolized. I have,
th erefore, included am ong counterrevolutionary actions here those that
explicitly announced them selves as such; actions in defense o f the nonjuring
clergy or hostile to the constitutional church; politicized religious procession s
that challenged the revolutionary state’s authority;123 and public and collec
tive resistance to the conscription that was announced in late February
1793.1241 d o not, how ever, include actions o f resistance against taxes, even
121. Michel VweBe, La découverte de la politique: Géopolitique de la Révolutionfrançaise (Paris:

Editions de la Découverte, 1993), 275.
122. VweDe, La découverte de la politique, 335-38; Roger Dupuy, De la Révolution à la
Chouannerie: Paysans en Bretagne, 1788-1794 (Paris: Flammarion, 1989), 335-36; Colin Lucas,
“Résistances populaires à la Révolution dans le sud-est," inJeanNicolas, e±. Mouvementspopulaires
et conscience sociale, XVIe-XIXe siècles (Paris: Makxne, 1985), 473-85.
123. A small chapel in the countryside near Cholet, for example, locally celebrated for its mirade-
workmg image of the Virgin, became, in the summer of 1791, the center of large and continual
processions of pilgrims, whose bare feet and hand-held candles were to the authorities so many
emblems of their “fanaticism.“ These processions and the local National Guard units became adept
at locating each other's movements and blocking or dispersing the other in what, in retrospect,
looks like practice for the pooling hide-and-seek of guerrilla warfare. On August 28, 1791, for
example, a National Guard unit operating between Chemülé and Cholet found its way blocked by a
suddenly appearing group of eight hundred carrying arms and singing hymns before a locally well-
known cross. See Port, Vendée angevine, 1:249.
124. I also include here earlier protest very dosely related to conscription. I have in mind, in
particular, the organized resistance that broke out in response to the catt for volunteers for the
mStary issued in the summer of 1792 a half-year before the more threatening full-blown conscription
was launched. Conscientious local administrators were probably preparing for conscription before it
was nationally organized; in maritime areas, for example, mounting tensions with England led
mayors to do preconscription paperwork (for an example from the Vendée, see Chassin, La
préparation de la Vendée, 3:270). By 1792 the pool of volunteers in some genuine sense was
down—uncompeOed volunteers had already joined up in 1791—and the war was on. Although the
government called for “volunteers,'’ local communities had to resort to coercion to fill their quotas.
. Even at the high point of genuine volunteering in 1791, volunteering was largely an urban
phenomenon; by one count, only 15% of the volunteers were rural. See Alan Forrest, Conscripts
when those taxes w ere the new creations o f the regim e rather than
holdovers o f the old order; nor do I include challenges to the new authorities
over food issues. Clearly, the latter tw o form s o f resistance to the revolu
tionary state had the consequence o f weakening its capacity to defend itself,
but unless self-advertised as in principle antagonistic to the new ord er125
they w ere not considered here. This am ounts to taking a refusal to serve in
the revolutionary state’s w ars as defying the new order m ore overtly than
refusing to pay its taxes. W hen a group o f country people dem ands the
abrogation o f new laws in favor o f the traditional custom ary law o f the region
at the sam e tim e that they want their old priest back (and are busy making
life as m iserable as possible for the new one) it seem s reasonable to accept
their self-description as equivalent to “ counterrevolutionary, ” although they
them selves don’t use the term .126 T he constitutional church was a newfan
gled (and in som e regions a w idely detested) innovation, identifiable with
the Revolution and no other regim e; the new conscription w as not for som e
gen eric w arfare against an unknown territory but rather for revolutionary
France in its life-and-death struggle with the crow ned tyrants o f E urope.
In avoiding lumping all opponents o f the forces o f order o f the m om ent
together, I am avoiding lumping together the ultra-revolutionaries and the
ds-revolutionaries (unlike the Com m ittee o f Public Safety during the T er
ror). It is therefore a bit difficult for an event to get labeled counterrevolu
tionary here: unless it is attacking the recruiting sergeant in 1793 or trying
to lynch a constitutional priest, a group has to identify itself explicitly as in
opposition to the new state. Alm ost 8% o f incidents w e found fit the bill.
C ounterrevolution as understood here occurred in a geographically narrow
range o f rural France, in about one bailliage in eigh t Table 5.8 show s that
nearly half o f the counterrevolutionary even ts involve som e action oriented
to the polarized church; while substantially few er even ts involve m ilitary
recruitm ent, they occurred in about the sam e num ber o f bailliages. R esis
tance to the new religious order, in regions w here it occu rred, w as, it
and Deserters: TheArmy and French Society During the Revolution and Empire (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1989), 20-26; andJean-Paul Bertaud, The Army of the French Revolution: From
Citizen-Soldiers to Instrument offlower (Princeton; Princeton University Press, 1988), 51, 54, 70.
125. At an evening meeting onJune 19,1791, for example, peasants from two communities near
ChemiUé applauded a tenant-farmer who praised the old order (Port, Vendée angevine, 1:212).
126. Some other instances of a self-proclaimed counterrevolutionary identity (even without use
of the term): adopting a white flag (the Bourbon color) rather than the tricolor, especially after the
overthrow of the king; attacks on bearers of tricolor insignia; pejorative use of terminology denoting
adherents of the Revolution, as in the use of démocrate as a term of invective; breaking up the
electoral procedures introduced by the Revolution; protest over formation of local pro-revolutionary
dubs; attacks on local, district, or departmental officials attempting to enforce specifically revolution
ary policies (inventorying church property for sale, for instance). (For instances of these see Port,
Vendée angevine, 1:211, 212, 316, 322; Chassin, La préparation de la Vendée, 1:249 et seq., 323,
3:4-5; Dupuy, De la Révolution à la Chouannerie, 219-39).
appears, far m ore intense than resistance to the draft (even it in M ardi
1793, it w as the draft that ignited the explosion).
C ounterrevolutionary events m ight w ell utilize actions that appear to draw
on the sam e collective repertoire as other events. C onsider a group o f
country people around La Caillère (near Fontenay) w ho seized a list o f
potential conscripts for coastal defense on February 2 4 ,1 7 9 3 .127 T hey w ere
attem pting to defy an oppressor engaged in som ething far m ore system atic
than random predation— in developing a capacity for rationalized seizures o f
resou rces— ju st as other peasant com m unities had seized or burned the
record s o f the tax system , the lords, and the m onasteries. W hen peasants
supporting their good priest rip out the church benches o f “ patriots” 128 they
draw on the sam e act o f cleansing the house o f G od as do other peasants in
destroying the places in church reserved for the lord’s fam ily.129
Panics
Panic appeared in the great w ork o f G eorges L efebvre on The Great Fear as
a rem arkable form o f rural m obilization all its ow n. L efebvre docum ents, for
the first sum m er o f the Revolution, the rapid spread, from a small num ber
o f distinct epicenters, yielding a nearly sim ultaneous chain o f panics through
much o f the countryside. The background is the confluence o f social (and
natural) forces that im bued that m om ent with a rem arkable com bination o f
hope and desperation. A period o f econom ic hardship was capped o ff by a
disastrous harvest; threatening strangers w ere everyw here as the unem
ployed and the hungry sought the m eans o f survival at precisely the m om ent
Tfcble 5 .8 . Types o f Counterrevolutionary Events

TVpe o f Event Percentage o f Percentage o f
(Fine Categories) Events BaüUages
Defense o f nonjuring clergy; attacks on civil

constitution (including juring dergy) 48% 54%
Resistance to conscription or voluntary
recruitment 15 52
127. Chassin, Lapréparation dt la Vendit, 3:270.

128. Ibid., 1:244-45.
129. One wonders whether, in this new world of revolution, the antipatriot bench destruction
doesn’t also carry the power of inversion. Is the attack on the church benches of supporters of the
Revolution a reappropriation that gathers ironic force when seen against a background of anti-
seigneurial events? I know of no evidence that would permit one to know if western peasants
ripping out benches are (or aren’t) makinga statement about their felows attacking their lords.
when the political im passes o f the elites paralyzed the repressive capacities
norm ally deployed against vagabondage, capacities inadequate even in good
tim es; the unprecedented summoning o f the E states-G eneral roused hopes
even as assem bling in their forty thousand com m unities to draft cahiers
involved large num bers o f country people in the experience o f form ulating
their grievances and o f banding together for the com m on expression o f
those grievances; insurrections in the tow ns and in the countryside had
begun and w ere understood in peasant villages both as m odels and as
threats. In this clim ate, rum ors spread fast and far, and in late July and early
August rural France was convulsed by a belief in an invading force bent on
stopping the revolutionary p rocess. W hile som e held the invaders to be
aristocrats, others knew them as Savoyards or Germ ans or English (o r even
M oors) and everyw here villagers acted; som e fled into the forests, but
other sought arm s, roused the local lord out o f bed to lead them , m arched
o ff to fight the imaginary enem y. L efebvre tells us, m oreover, that the
G reat Fear w as not the only panic. T here w ere earlier and later fears as
w ell, less w idely diffused but not necessarily less intensely felt w here they
occurred. C overing the entire half-decade spanned by our data, the figures
in Table 5.1 identify 13% o f all incidents as panics. Remarkably (and
unexpectedly) by (m e m easure, at any rate, panics w ere the m ost w ide
spread o f all the form s w e have tabulated, occurring in tw o-thirds o f the
bailliages o f the country (and in nearly three-quarters o f all bailliages in
which disturbances o f one sort or another took place). If there w as a single
com m on m obilizational language in which Norman, Alsatian, Alpine, and
Provençal country people all spoke, one would alm ost say it w as panic.
Recapitulation
M ost disturbances betw een 1788 and 1793 fit into one (or m ore) o f th ese
categories: jointly, antiseigneurial even ts, religiously tinged events, anti
tax even ts, panics, land conflicts, w age con flicts, anti-authority even ts,
subsistence events, and counterrevolution constitute som e 91% erf the
events that I id en tified 130 L et us recall that w e think o f an event as a
130. A few haphazard examples of less common events that fit none of the mqjor categories:
seizures of transported goods other than food (for example, on August 23 and again on November
21, 1792, wagonloads of cotton were seized by people from a dozen villages around Maromme in
Normandy (Guy Lemarchand, Lafin duféodalisme dans le pays de Caux [Paris: Editions du Comité
des Travaux Historiques et Scientifiques, 1989], 447); attacks on people identified as "nobles” (but
not also clearly “lords”) or the taking of positions other than those so far enumerated (the two
combined, for example, mthe summer of 1789 at Montdkfier where peasants forced nobles to wear
revolutionary insignia and cry "Long live the Third Estate") (Lefebvre, La Grande Anr, 238);
movements over prices other than food as in coerced price reductions on wood and iron such as
enforced on March 3,1792, at an ironworks at Conches OfoveOe, Ville et Campagne, 240).
sequence o f discrete actions. A single m ultiaction event m ight have actions

that place it sim ultaneously in m ore than one o f these nine categories. A
dem and for the docum entation on the basis o f which a m onastery lays
claim to seigneurial rights is an event that is counted under both the
“ antiseigneurial’’ and “ religiously tinged’’ rubrics, for exam ple. It follow s,
then, that many actions that fall outside o f our categories may be attached
to events w hose other actions place them within one (or m ore such
category). If a group o f peasants invades the fields o f large, local landholders
som e o f whom are seigneurs, som e o f whom are w ell-to-do urbanites, and
som e o f whom are w ealthy peasants them selves w e have an entry in our
antiseigneurial group, a fairly rare entry under “ land conflict” as w ell as an
action that fits under none o f our rubrics. The 91% figure ju st cited refers
to even ts all o f w hose actions are contained within our nine categories. An
additional 5% o f events have som e actions that could not be so classified.
Finally, 4% either fall w holly outside these nine or are even ts w hose nature
is unknow n.131
Rural Revolt, 1788-1793

T h e form s o f peasant action, w e see, are varied. But they are variations
within known patterns. T here are a num ber o f m otifs (“ routines” in the
language o f students o f contestation) that regularly recu r
• Seizure or destruction o f pow er-giving docum ents (the titles o f lords,

the tax rolls, the conscription lists)
• Sacking the residence o f w rongdoers (the lord, the tax official, the
official in charge o f food supply, the m erchant, the peasant withholding
grain from the m arket)
• T he rescu e o f one’s fellow (seized in the wake o f antiseigneurial, anti
tax, or subsistence event; conscripted)
• T he reappropriation (o f land: the invasion o f field or forest; o f exactions:
the counterexaction o f cash from lord or m onastery; o f the sou rce o f
ju stice: erection/destruction o f gallow s; o f one’s fellow : the rescu e)
• Severing the enem y’ s sacred tie (the destruction o f the church benches
o f lords or o f opposing sides in the church split o f 1791; assaults cm
opponents’ priests by p ro- and counterrevolutionaries)
• Redistribution (o f grain; o f m oney taken from lord or cleric)
• Im posing costs on violators o f communal solidarity (by threatening or
131. Occasionally a source tdb us no more than that there was a disturbance, with little
information as to its character.
attacking peasants w ho m ight make paym ents to church or lord despite

a boycott; w ho m ight w ork as laborers at unacceptable w ages; w ho
m ight be hauling grain to m arket at unacceptable prices; w ho rem ove
them selves from collectively decided agricultural routines; w ho attend
religious services conducted by the w rong priest)
M ost o f these elem ents w ere familiar to villagers and authorities alike, a
circum stance perm itting their rapid diffusion. O f cou rse there w ere num er
ous innovations in detail: such as self-identification by revolutionary tricolor
or Bourbon w hite; or identifying clerical deviation with position taken on the
ecclesiastical oath o f 1791. And there w ere occasional irruptions o f peasant
actions the authorities did not understand (the m aypoles in the Southw est;
see Chapter 8 ). But taken individually, there w as m uch about m ost o f the
actions that would have been familiar in the pre-1789 countryside. Even
such a specific trigger o f action as revolutionary legislation on religion was
challenged in large part by peasants rejecting a new ly assigned priest o r
defying the authority o f an old one with w ell-know n gestu res.132 T he attacks
w ere generally m ade by local people in their ow n localities (although som e
even ts, like the great m arket invasions o f the spring and late autumn o f
1792 in the plains betw een the Seine and the L oire, involved traveling bands
som etim es o f vast siz e );133 they are in large part direct assertions o f ju stice,
seizures or reseizu res o f resou rces or, m ore rarely, punitive actions rather
than appeals to national authorities. (W e have seen, indeed, that anti-tax
even ts apart, w hatever officials are attacked tend to be lo c a l) And they
often borrow the repertoire o f the authorities them selves: the crow d fixes
the food prices w here the authorities have neglected their duty; they m ake
the lord five up to his claim s as p rotector by com pelling him to feed them .
The borrow ing may be straight or it may be m alicious parody: if the lords
had hunted when and w here they ch ose, now it is their pigeons, rabbits, or
fish that are slaughtered; now it is the peasant com m unity that erects
gallow s. In the turbulent seventeenth century, when many a local lord w ent
his ow n way, often joining one or another m urderous m ilitary contingent,
the reassertion o f royal authority som etim es punished m utinous lords by
dem olishing their châteaux or felling their trees. In the late eighteenth
century, with a state unequal to the effort, the country people took up the
132. In a village in Rouergue in 1736, for example, parishioners tumultuously prevented a priest
from reading a statement that the local lord had given him (the local women tore his clerical garb);
a half-dozen years later, women from a nearby village as well as men dressed as women greeted a
new priest with stones. See Jacques Frayssenge and Nicole Lemaître, “Les Emotions populaires en
Rouergue au XVIIIe siècle,” in Jean Nicolas, ed., Mouvements populaires et conscience sociale,
XVIe-XIXe siècles (Paris: Maloine, 1985), 378.
133. \bveDe, Ville et campagne, 230-31.
task.13415AH o f this approxim ates Charles Tilly’ s summary sketch o f traditional

3
form s o f European collective action.136 Tilly suggests a m arvelous checklist
o f the characteristics w hereby w e m ight sum marize the traditional patterns
o f popular contestation that had developed in the form ative period o f
W estern European statem aking (let us say, sixteenth through eighteenth
centuries); these patterns may be contrasted with a m ore recen t repertoire
o f contention that crystallized in the nineteenth century and continues to the
present day.136
T he m ost im portant w ay in which the revolutionary even ts in the data
studied here deviate from Tilly’s generic portrait is not in his approxim ate
listing o f form s o f action but in his overall summary o f “ local” and “ patron
ized .” L ocal these even ts certainly are; patronized they just as certainly are
n o t T h ese actions are neither m ade on behalf o f nor rarely w ith the support
o f som e pow erful patron external to the com m unity; and only rarely do they
appeal to any such patron. T hey are usually direct attacks. And yet they
betray som ething beyond an exclusive focu s on everyday even ts in their full
con creten ess. W ith the very significant exception o f events with a religious
elem ent, it is only infrequently that they are centrally focu sed on harming
persons, vengefuUy or otherw ise. It is usually not the person o f the lord but
the sym bols that make a person a lord that are d estroyed .137
T he appropriation, parodistic or otherw ise, o f the action o f the authorities,
the quasi-legalistic strain in crow d action (som etim es paying for seized
grain— at a below -m arket ju st price) brings to mind Colin Lucas’s stress chi
the crow d as flow ing into a void left by authorities w ho have failed in their
duties. T he crow d substitutes in effect for the absent authority; rather than
having a fundamentally defiant character, the crow d in this characterization
is a sort o f pinch-hitter filing in for the derelict, m isguided, overburdened,
134. Onanextraordinaryroyal tribunal in 1665 see Arlette Lebigre, Les GrandsJours¿Auvergne.

Désordres et répression auXVIIe siècle (Paris: Hachette, 1976).
135. Charles Tilly, “Speaking Your Mind Without Elections, Surveys or Social Movements,"
Public Opinion Quarterly 47 (1983): 461-78.
136. William Sewell has criticized Tilly for neglecting the ways in which the Revolution opened
the path for popular mobilization of an “assodational” rather than a “communal” character; that is,
for organizing for struggle in special-purpose associations Hice chibs, parties, or unions rather than
in multipurpose corporate groupings like villages. I take up some indirect evidence for the
development of such assodational structures in Chapter 6. See William Sewell Jr., "Collective
Violence and Collective Loyalties in France: Why the French Revolution Made a Difference,” Thirties
andSociety 18 (1990): 527-52.
137. This is in no way to dispute Brian Singer’s quite briKant discussion of the ferocity of the
Parisian events in which someone was lynched, few in number until the late summer of 1792, but
spectacular—in the literal sense of constituting a spectacle. I do not believe my sources are
adequate to determine whether rural acts of exemplary vengeance share the characteristics Singer
describes for Paris. See Smger, “Violence in the French Revolution.”
or nearsighted agents o f a social order that is not at bottom challenged.1381 9

3
T he crow d is tem porary, the authority will return, the crow d desires nothing
m ore than this return, perhaps even, by its action, provokes it 1 believe
Lucas is com pelling and insightful in his description o f the behavior o f pre
revolutionary crow ds; with the breakdown o f the O ld Regim e, it is less
obvious that m obilized form s o f popular struggle w ere m erely filling in until
royal (or legislative) authority took m atters in hand. In large part they
em ployed the older vocabulary o f action, but I am not sure that the grammar
hadn’t changed. If peasants riot occasionally over a lord’s actions and
withdraw from the field when the courts step in, w e have the situation that
Lucas is describing. If peasants rise again and again over a half-decade until
they get the laws they want concerning the seigneurial regim e, it seem s no
longer adequate to speak o f a tem porary filling-in for absent authority. T he
peasants are learning how to influence authority, how to alter authority. And
if the actions have an im m ediate local target— T illy's point about traditional
actions— I shall show in what follow s that there was a distant, national agent
o f pow er already held as an audience as welL I shall show in Chapter 8 that
these local peasant actions w ere part o f a dialogue with the legislatures. T he
form s o f action may have been, still, very traditional fo r the m ost part; but
they w ere deployed for new er ends. Tactically, one m ight say, the targets
are still local; but strategically, there is another elem ent, and a national on e:
the peasants are shaping the Revolution.
Traditional form s o f contention, but untraditional utilization o f th ose form s:
one m ight say the sam e with regard to targets. The greatest target, w e
have seen, is the seigneurial regim e. N ow there is nothing traditional about
that w hatsoever. Emmanuel L e Roy Ladurie, noting the shift from the
central anti-tax thrust o f rural insurrection in the seventeenth century to
the strongly antiseigneurial actions o f the Revolution, has suggested that
som e great m utation m ust have taken place in the intervening century to
produce such an outcom e, and sees the understanding o f that p rocess by
which the lords supplanted the state as Peasant Enem y Num ber O ne as a
central agenda for French rural h istory.138 The question is all the m ore
intriguing when w e study the patterns o f rural insurrection in the relatively
peaceful century betw een the tw o great explosions. Jean N icolas and Guy
Lem archand have been engaged in an extensive p roject o f data collection
from 1661 into the spring o f 1789. T heir prelim inary results140 show the
138. A very fine study of an eighteenth-century crowd replacing an errant, even criminal,
authority set in a quintessentiafly urban milieu is Ariette Farge and Jacques Revel, Logiques de la
fimle (Paris: Hachette, 1988).
139. Le Roy Ladurie, "Révoltes et contestations rurales.”
140. Nicolas, "Les émotions dans l’ordinateur”; Lemarchand, “TVoubles populaires au XVŒe
siècle.”
continuing predom inance o f state over lord as a target dow n to the brink o f
revolution (although antiseigneurial events w ere on the rise).
Indeed, looking at the entire century and a quarter that they cover, (Hie
sees that subsistence events and anti-tax even ts w ere running neck and
neck, each with about 22% o f the incidents they have identified. A lso right
up there, contributing another 22% , are clashes with police, m ilitary, or
judicial authority (rather like our anti-authority category in fact). This in turn
is follow ed by a m iscellaneous group o f “ youth” events (a category I w as
unable to u se): youth groups involved in a variety o f brawls, conscription
resistance, inter- and intracommunal battles (about 9% ). Only then d oes
one get to antiseigneurial events (a relatively paltry 7% o f the total). Thus
the countryside after the long period o f croquants, nu-pieds, and Fronde was
not only relatively quiet but had not yet turned away from what w e may call
a “ traditional” focu s on taxes and food supply, taxation being the great
focu s o f the m ajor seventeenth-century risings, subsistence grow ing to
prom inence around century’s end. One o f the great things about the N icolas-
Lem archand data is the clarity o f its overall tem poral pattem . From low
levels during much o f the century, apart from a spike around the great
fam ine o f 1709, one sees clearly that the curve o f conflict starts to rise in
the 1760s. T h ere is a sharp peak, the highest in the century so far, at the
Flour War o f 1775 and although the trajectory falls back afterw ard, it
rem ains above its pre-1760s level and then begins a new , accelerating, dizzy
ascent in the late 1780s. It is clear that the term “prerevolution,” w idely
used for the elite conflicts and crises o f the last years o f the Old Regim e, had
a plebeian counterpart, largely neglected in current accounts o f revolutionary
origins. Equally striking to us m ust be the grow th in antiseigneurial actions.
N ot only do the total num ber o f rural clashes tracked by N icolas and
Lem archand rise from the 1760s on, but the antiseigneurial em phasis o f
those clashes rises as w ell For the entire 1661-1789 stretch, the num ber
o f anti-tax events exceed s antiseigneurial events by 3 to 1; in the last five
years o f the Old Regim e, how ever the ratio has fallen to 2 to 1. If
antiseigneurial events are beginning to grow ,141 how ever, they are still, on
the verge o f revolution, far from dom inant And in the eighteenth century
as a w hole, they are, to reiterate, considerably outw eighed by both anti-tax
and subsistence events. In this conclusion, N icolas and Lem archand have
been seconded by a num ber o f regional studies that converge on finding
eighteenth-century antiseigneurial actions outnum bered in som e places by
anti-tax events, in others by subsistence events, in still others by a diverse
141. For some confirmation of a rise in antiseigneurial actions late in the Ok) Regime, see Nicole
Castan, Les criminels de Languedoc: Les exigences dordre et les voies du ressentiment dans une société
pri-rtvolutiomuñn (1750-1790) (Toulouse: Associationdes Publicationsde l'Université de Toulouse-
Mirafl, 1980). 103-11.
array o f insurrectionary form s.142 So antiseigneurial events may have been

<xi tiie rise, but dow n to the breakdown o f the Okl Regim e, they w ere not
the dominant m ode o f rural resistan ce.143
This survey o f the general pattern o f eighteenth-century insurrection and
o f the lim ited but real shifts in targets late in the Old Regim e, m ay be
paralleled by m ore lim ited, but nonetheless im portant, data on shifts in
patterns o f grievance-m aking. It would be m arvelous w ere w e able to g o
back before that spring o f 1789 to see how the pattern o f grieving in the
parishes had been changing. We cannot do this for all o f France, but R oger
C h arter's w ork on the E states-G eneral o f 1614 at least perm its us to d o it
for a single bailliage, TV oyes.144 T here is m uch to be garnered from this
com parison, and w e will reiterate our discussion from Chapter 3.
A ccording to Chartier, in 1614 an im pressive 48% o f grievances addressed
taxation; indeed, in his view a good deal o f other grievances im plicitly bore
on the sta tes' new ly increased hunger for revenue, bringing the quantity of
early seventeenth-century grievances that focu sed on taxes to som e tw o-
thirds o f the total. B y contrast, a m ere 3% o f grievances addressed the
seigneurial regim e. Rather than com pare this with our ow n national totals
for 1789 or even our ow n figures for the bailliage o f TVoyes, let us use
C hartier's ow n data for TVoyes at the onset o f revolution so that there is no
question o f the consistency o f categories. His taxation category has now
fidlen considerably to a still im pressive 33% and his seigneurial category is
up strikingly to 11% 14S (n ote that this is roughly sim ilar to our ow n national
picture; see Chapter 2, p. 40).
What this adds up to is as sim ple to state as it is significant in its
im plications. Long-run p rocesses had increased peasant attacks on their
lords, w hether one m easures the structure o f grievances or the nature o f
insurrectionary actions betw een the seventeenth century and the collapse
o f the Old Regim e. The search for a long-run p rocess that m ight e ffe ct such
142. See three of the essays in Jean Nicolas, ed., Mouvements populaires et conscience sociale,
XVle-XIXe siècles (Paris: Maloine, 1985); René Pilorget, “Les mouvements insurrectionete de
Provence (1715-1788),” 351-60; Frayssenge and Lemaître, "Les émotions populaires en Rouer-
gue”; and Abel Pûitrineau, “Le détonateur économico-fiscal et la charge des rancoeurs catégorieles
profondes, lors des explosions de la colère populaire en Auvergne, au XVIIIe siècle," 361-70. (1
have included Poitrineau on Auvergne here even though he gives no figures, because of the general
tenor of his essay.)
143. The area around Sadat seems unusual in the degree to which colective actions at the end
of the Old Regime were directed at lords or their agents (Reinhardt, Justice m the Sariadais, 227).
Future research might reveal more such localities.
144. Roger Chartier et Jean Nagle, "Paroisses et châtellenies en 1614” and Roger Chartier, “De
1614 à 1789: le déplacement des attentes,” in Roger Chartier and Denis Richet, Représentation et
vouloir politiques: Autour des Hats-giniraux de 1614 (Paris: Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences
Sociales, 1982). 89-100 and 101-12.
145. Chartier, “De 1614 à 1789,” 108-9.
a change is th erefore an im portant enterprise. We are led to affirm the good

sen se o f Tilly’s observation that m ajor shifts in the nature o f contention are
not ju st outgrow ths o f the contingencies o f the m om ent T here are deep,
long-run p rocesses that realign interests and that create or destroy capaci
ties for action. W e m u st Tilly w rites, "look beyond narrow ly political
explanations.” 146 Som ething was happening in the century that preceded the
Revolution to turn the French countryside away from its som etim es violent
rejection o f the daim s o f the state and tow ard a focu s on the seigneurial
regim e. O ne m ust consider changes in the state, in the seigneurial regim e
and in the social w orld o f the French countryside itself. We m ust consider a
possible M arxian transform ation in the form o f a linking o f local econom ies
w ith regional, national, or international ones. In this linking, considerations
o f com m ercial advantage in distant m arkets cam e to shape the social w orld
that m oved in local arenas, a process rife with con flict And w e m ust
consider as w ell a possible Tocquevillean p rocess in which an increasingly
present and increasingly rationalizing central authority w as expanding its
ow n tasks, encouraging a political culture o f standardization and uniform ity,
sucking the vitality out o f regionally rooted elites by luring their talents to
Paris and by establishing a sense that the future would see the subm erging
o f regional distinctions in national pow er. This centralization, for T ocqueville,
m eant the concom itant erosion o f deferen ce tow ard what rem ained o f local
relations o f dom ination.147
But w e also m ust see that such long-term p rocesses take us only part o f
the w ay and no farther. T he increase in prerevolutionary antiseigneuralism ,
either as grievances openly expressed when rare opportunities offered or
as insurrectionary direct action when m ore com m on opportunities offered ,
are still inadequate to explain the degree to which antiseigneuralism w as the
dom inant m ode o f action o f a countryside in revolution. W hatever shifts
tow ard antiseigneurial targets there may have been in prerevolutionary
actions or grievances, such shifts are only a step tow ard the predom inantly
antiseigneurial countryside o f France in revolution that appears in Table 5 .1 .
O r rather, such long-term p rocesses only get us to the starting gate: they
do not by any m eans explain what happened within the Revolution to give
the antiseigneurial risings the role they had.
W e are led, then, to a version o f a question Lynn Hunt posed at the ou tset
o f her Politics, Culture and Class in the French Revolution. 148 H er com plaint
was that the M arxist and Tocquevillean perspectives alike tend to jum p from
a set o f prerevolutionary conditions to a set o f postrevohitionary outcom es,
146. TBy, The ContentiousFrench, 9.

147. We sha! attempt to assess these theses in Chapter 7.
148. Lynn A. Hunt, Politics, Culture and Class m the French Revolution (Berkeley and Los
Angeles: University of California Press, 1984), 1-16.
as if nothing happened in the Revolution that w as problem atic, contingent,

uncertain. T he Revolution is m erely the turbulent path from a given begin
ning to a known ending.
But after several chapters’ w orth o f grievances at the on set o f revolution,
w e m ust, I think, accept that the Revolution, or at least its rural aspect,
should be considered as a p rocess. C onsider an imaginary reader in the
spring o f 1789 w ho m iraculously has this book’s first four chapters and a
quiet evening. This is a reader w ho d oes not yet know that June 17, July 14,
and August 4 are going to happen. Our reader, provided with the tabulations
presented in those chapters, m ight w ell have surm ised that, although
antiseigneurial grieving in the countryside is up, the sheer am ount o f rural
com plaining about taxation is vastly greater; that taxation issues have been
the trigger o f rural contention not m erely in the great insurrections o f the
seventeenth century but also in the m ore sporadic and sm aller-scale strug
gles o f the eighteenth (thus far) alongside subsistence concerns; and that,
m oreover, there w as much consensus betw een the peasants and the w ell-
to-d o (M i tax issues. Such a reader, in fact, m ight find only the height o f
sen se in a governm ent w hose reform ers hoped that a good package o f tax
reform s could be enacted, sim ultaneously soothing the countryside and
ending the treasury’s ache.
O ther readers, perhaps shrew der, noting the actual insurrectionary pat
tern in late 1788 and early 1789 (see Chapter 6 ), rather than extrapolating
from the past and the cahiers, m ight have placed less stress on taxation and
m ore on subsistence issues. This prediction would have been far closer to
the mark, but still incom plete. That the countryside was going to rise again
and again against the lords, that the legislature would define its break with
the past as first and forem ost a break with “ feudalism ” rather than a clear
program o f tax reform — these are not obvious features o f either grievance
or rebellion at the beginning o f 1789 (although w e can find in the cahiers the
seeds from which they grow ). The turn tow ard antiseigneuraüsm in the
countryside, w e shall see, w as ju st that— a turn; the legislative actions on
seigneurial rights w ere not ju st the drawing-out o f the logical im plications o f
som e set o f principles already present to the revolutionary elites. L egislators
and peasants confronted one another and not in an em pty room , but in a
con text; out o f that confrontation and within that con text (and the con text
itself changed) cam e the decisions in many peasant com m unities to run the
risks o f injury to others and to them selves in trying to throw o ff the
dom ination o f the lord; and the decisions to legislate an increasingly radical
dism antlem ent cam e out o f that confrontation as w ell
If the relatively low proportions o f anti-tax events in our data are credible,
then, they m ust be set beside the tabulations o f N icolas and others that
indicated that the transform ation in the key target o f peasant wrath that L e
Roy Ladurie wants us to explore was not com plete on the very eve o f the
Revolution. Som ething m ust have happened in the cou rse o f the Revolution
itself that m ade the lords rather than the state the prim e ta rg et But what?
W e m ust ask again what it w as that made rural conflict so focu sed on the
seigneurial rights. If the great seventeenth-century struggles w ere centrally
about taxes, if the eighteenth century's m uch-reduced turbulence sees taxes
vie with food as the prim ary concerns (even after taking into account an
increase in antiseigneurial even ts); if the grievances o f the spring o f 1789
still have a considerable preponderance o f dem ands about taxation (although
the antiseigneurial dem ands o f the countryside are bitterer), if a com parison
o f the docum ents o f 1789 with those o f 1614 d oes show an increase in
antiseigneurial sentim ent and a decrease in anti-tax view s, but also show s
that these changes still leave the lion’s share o f grieving focu sed on taxes,
how did the pattern o f peasant action com e to take on its antiseigneurial
preponderance? T he exploration o f the deploym ent o f rural action over tim e
is our obvious next step.
C h apter
6
R h yth m s of C o n t e n t io n
Peaks and Troughs

A s a baseline for what follow s, Figure 6.1 displays the overall ebb and flow
o f rural conflict from June 1788 through June 1793. Each point represents
the total num ber o f events in a one-m onth span. In addition to the num ber
o f even ts, it is often valuable to consider other facets o f the intensity o f
con flict I had no confidence in being able to assess the duration o f m ore
than a small m inority o f those cases that lasted beyond a day, them selves a
m inority o f all even ts. The num ber o f bailliages in which conflict took place
over the cou rse o f a m onth was as easy to m easure as the sheer num ber o f
incidents, and could serve to indicate the geographic range o f con flict The
num ber o f participants was rarely given very clearly but the num ber o f
parishes w hose people joined the event was m uch m ore com m only indicated;
one m ight think o f this as a m easure o f size, Old Regim e style, in which a
corporate, rather than an individualistic, sen se o f representation prevailed.
One m ight also hope to m easure the destructiveness o f particular even ts
Rhythms of Contention 271
but consistent estim ation o f the extent o f personal iqjury or property dam age
w as not possible.
It turns out that both the num ber o f bailliages in which even ts took place
and the estim ated num ber o f parishes involved in even ts have trajectories
very similar to the sim ple num ber o f events. It follow s, then, that other
aspects o f the intensity o f conflict are either not available for any very large
proportion o f incidents (duration, size conceived o f as the num ber o f
individual participants, extent o f dam age) or have shapes that differ little
from the sheer num ber o f events (num ber o f bailliages or parishes with
con flicts). I shall, th erefore, usually only present data on the sheer num ber
o f events. Although it will be the com parative soundings o f the ebb and flow
o f different sorts o f conflict that will prove m ost revealing, this aggregated
graph already displays som e o f the fundamental features that will appear,
with variations, in all o f the subsequent figures. The single m ost striking
thing in this graph is its saw tooth character. C onflicts oscillate wildly from
m e m onth to the n ex t This is, w e shall see as w e p roceed, no less true o f
m ost specific form s o f conflict as it is o f aggregate figures.
This seesaw pattern is telling us som ething quite fundamental about the
nature o f these clashes. The fundamental reason for this pattern is the
quintessentially interactive character o f social con flict If w e are willing to
make the sm allest gesture tow ard seeing participants in even the m ost
(Based on 4689 Events)

disorderly o f politics as under the influence, if not necessarily the dictate, o f

reason, and if w e bear in mind the profoundly interactive character o f these
clashes, the wild oscillations follow . (And all the m ore so if w e see peasant
com m unities as engaging in a good deal o f reasoned evaluation o f their
situation, as the evidence o f the cahiers strongly indicates that they d o).
The questions confronting these com m unities involve not m erely the form u
lation o f their needs, but a sense o f the risks and benefits associated with
alternative cou rses o f action. Is attacking the seigneurial regim e likely to
result in any payoff? Is it likely to get one hanged or confined for years in a
m iserable galley? T h ese calculations are them selves highly com plex. W hat
is the firm ness o f will o f those in command o f the forces o f repression? And
what is their repressive capacity in light o f the num ber o f sim ilarly inclined
peasants in m y com m unity and in sim ilarly inclined com m unities across the
province and across the kingdom ? A s inform ation about what sorts o f action
one may safely get away with com es in, assessm ents o f the risk probabilities
shift; as inform ation about the thinking o f the revolutionary leadership (in
Paris, in the main tow n o f the local département, in the nearest m arket)
com es in, there is a shift in the sense o f what sorts o f payoff may accrue to
particular actions. A s the Old Regim e collapsed, all the old assessm ents o f
risk and o f su ccess w ere shattered and every new developm ent had potential
reverberations across F rance's forty thousand rural com m unities. It seem s
a reasonable speculation that new s that a com m unity got away w ith com pel
ling a lord to make a w ritten renunciation o f his claim s traveled far; so did
the new s the next month that the nearby urban National Guard hunted
dow n insurrectionary peasants and hanged several. N ew s that the National
A ssem bly issued a favorable d ecree on the future o f the tithe also traveled;
so did assessm ents o f the relationship o f those in com m and o f local arm ed
forces to central governm ents.1 In short, w e have a continual pattern o f
assessm ent and reassessm ent o f form s and targets o f action, w ith an eye
on their relative safety and relative efficacy. Relevant inform ation continued
to flow about the m ilitary, the local National Guards, local lords and clerics,
national urban political groupings, the next village, and the generality o f
villages. The im pulse to strike and to strike in particular directions and with
particular m eans, all underwent continual rev isioa
The extrem e oscillation o f these and other graphs may make the statistical
analysis o f such data tricky, but it is o f the greatest significance for historical
and sociological understanding. It is not possible to appreciate con flict fully
1. We do not, alas, have many studies that permit one to evaluate these hypotheses, but
detailed research on the diffusion of news of particularly striking events (the Great Fear or the royal
flight to Varennes) shows how readily and swiftly important information traveled from one rural
community to the next See Lefebvre, La Grande Peur de 1789 (Paris: Armand Cohn, 1970) and
Guy Arbeitet and Bernard Lepetit, Atlas de la Révolutionfrançaise, vol 1, Rôtîtes et communications
(Paris: Editions de l’Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, 1987), 70.
by considering only one side: that is what follow s from grasping the
interactive nature o f conflict phenom ena. Positing som e peasant propensi
ties, then, in them selves, can only be a part o f the story. T h eories o f the
sou rces o f m obilization for action are many and their applicability to the
revolutionary situation o f the French countryside are equally many. Is it
peasant hardship (as indicated, perhaps, by the level or the increase in food
p rices) that drives people in general and French peasants in the Revolution
to rise? Is it a changed consciousness (as indicated perhaps by variations in
levels o f rural literacy)? Is it the erosion o f traditional relationships with local
patrons under the heavy hand o f the bureaucratizing state (a thesis dear to
Tocqueville that may be explored em pirically by com paring provinces under
the adm inistrative control o f the king’s intendants with those in w hich
Provincial E states still held significant pow ers)? Is it the dynamism o f the
m arket econom y that upsets older form s o f stable accom m odations (and it is
easy enough to distinguish relatively com m ercialized from uncom m erdalized
areas in the late eighteenth century by the urban presen ce, the density o f
road and river netw orks, or even the flow o f m arketable com m odities)? T he
current fashion in the Am erican literature on social m ovem ents places heavy
stress on structural contexts and organizational capacities,2 even to the
exclusion o f grievances altogeth er again one can explore the strong regional
differences in rural communal structures and look for those that m ight m ore
readily nurture insurrection.
T h ere may be som ething to one or som e or all o f these th eses.3 But what
none o f them , in them selves, can explain, is the sharp oscillatory pattern.
For that w e need to see that peasant com m unities, m ore or less hungry,
m ore or less under the thumb o f the state, m ore or less literate, m ore or
less in the m arket, are looking at one another, at what happened last m onth,
at the local National Guards, at the political situation in nearby tow ns and
distant capitals, and are making judgm ents o f danger and o f opportunity.
If the spikiness o f this (and other) graphs is to be expected on the basis
o f the social dynam ics o f insurrectionary w aves, the particular points at
which the country people experienced favorable opportunities, safety in
action, and opportune targets are a function o f the specificities o f the
historical m om ent The social dynam ics leads one to exp ect peaks and
troughs but not any particular peak or trough. It is not the general social
dynam ics that explains the great spike o f July 1789 and the lesser spikes o f
January 1790, June 1790, June 1791, April 1792, August 1792, and M arch
2. For example, Mayer Zald andJohnD. McCarthy, TheDynamics ofSocialMovements: Resource

Mobilization, Social Control and Tactics (Cambridge, Mass., 1979) and Social Movements in an
OrganizationalSociety (New Brunswick, N.J.: Dransaction Books, 1987); Anthony Oberschall, Social
Conflict and Social Movements (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.; Prentice-HaB, 1973).
3. For the use of regional comparisons to weigh these and other theses about the social roots
of rural revolt, see Chapter 7.
1793, nor the troughs o f Septem ber-N ovem ber 1789, M arch 1790, D ecem
ber 1790, M arch 1791, June 1792, or January 1793. Another way to point
up the spikiness o f the ebb and flow o f even ts is to notice that the six m ost
eventful m onths (am ong the sixty-one m onths covered ) contain 50% o f all
incidents; July 1789 alone, the spike o f spikes, accounts for som e 25% . By
contrast, the six quietest m onths Qune, July, O ctober, N ovem ber, and
D ecem ber 1788 and D ecem ber 1790) contain a m ere 2% . (W e shall investi
gate below w hether the m ovem ents in the peak m onths differed from those
o f the troughs in character or only in quantity.)
Eight Trajectories
Up to this point w e have only explored the very crude sum o f all insurrection
ary even ts. L et us now consider separately the m ajor form s o f rural action.
Our first inquiry is into the general character o f the peaks and troughs.
C onsider tw o rather extrem e and opposed conceptions o f rural action. In
the first, the Revolution is, for the country people, m erely a glorious series
o f opportunities to strike out at all enem ies, as the coercive pow er o f the
state collapses. W ith such a proposition, the choice o f a particular target is
virtually a m atter o f happenstance; all form s o f action, responding to pretty
m uch the sam e opportunities should ebb and flow at the sam e rhythm s as
one another; the peaks and troughs o f the aggregate trajectory o f events
should th erefore be replicated in miniature in each particular type o f action.
The second, and quite different, im age urges us to see each form o f action
as follow ing its ow n rhythm s. The peasants are seen as clearly distinguishing
am ong various enem ies; the opportune m om ents to strike and the perceived
rew ards for striking are different for various targets. The Revolution is not
a single bloc but a kaleidoscope o f different sorts o f opportunity and
constraint: indeed, perhaps in som e w ays it is better thought o f as a series
o f revolutions in the plural.4 (O r surely better still, w e need to see it as both
one and m any.) In this im age, the peaks and troughs o f different form s o f
action need not coincide because favorable opportunities for one form o f
action may be distinct from the tim e for another.
We shall drop our "anti-authority" category here since these even ts
alm ost always appear as a continuation o f som e other struggle and th erefore
rise and fall with them . W hen country people ambush a m ilitary patrol or
seize the building that houses local authority it alm ost always is an attem pt
4. Not yet having fully acquired its modem meaning, the term was, in 1789, at first used in the
plural, as in the title of the journal that first appeared on July 18, 1789, Révolutions dt Rtris. But
soon a conception of a series of “revolutions” gave way to a conception of a singular and unitary
process, “the French Revolution.” See Keith Michael Baker, “Inventing the French Revolution,” in
his Essays on French Political Culture m the Eighteenth Century (New York: Cambridge University
Press, 1990), 203-23.
to free their fellow s seized as a result o f antiseigneurial or anti-tax actions,

to release villagers conscripted by force, to prevent the enforcem ent o f
som e edict on land use, or to get at the hated juring (or nonjuring)
p rie st From this point on w e shall restrict ourselves to the eight other
m ajor categories.
Figures 6 .2 (a M d ) present a series o f miniature graphlets show ing the
num ber o f events each m onth in each o f our m ajor categories plotted against
tim e. T o perm it ready com parison o f the location o f peaks and troughs, each
graph has its ow n scale set so that the largest spike for each is about the
sam e h eigh t Thus the 6 struggles over w ages that took place in M arch
1792 look as im pressive, relative to other w age-conflict episodes, as the
323 antiseigneurial disturbances o f July 1789. In other w ords, w e are
focu sed here on the rhythm s rather than the amplitude o f the con flict
T he com parison o f the eight graphs reveals both com m on elem ents and
particularities. To point up one com m on elem ent in the trajectories: all
the graphs, if to different degrees, exhibit considerable m onth-to-m onth
oscillation. T here is no stable form o f conflict that serves as a sort o f
m onotonous undertone to all the r e s t On the other hand, it appears, there
are circum stances favoring many (but not all) form s o f rural con flict there
are other circum stances uniquely favorable to one or another particular
form . The antiseigneurial m ovem ent exhibits three main peaks: a great one
in July 1789 (323 even ts) that is trailing o ff but still substantial in August (78
even ts), a second peak in the spring o f 1792 with 75 even ts in M arch and
rising to 189 in April, and a third in January 1790 (159 even ts). T here are
also three lesser peaks (o f 56 to 61 events apiece) in June 1790, June 1791,
and Septem ber 1792. Five o f the other seven form s o f action also experience
a high point in July 1789 but otherw ise differ in varying degrees from the
rhythm s o f the antiseigneurial challenges.
Religiously tinged events are the closest to the antiseigneurial pattern
(although the April 1792 peak w as alm ost equaled in M arch). Subsistence
events follow a three-peak pattern clearly enough but the second peak is
definitely a bit earlier (M arch rather than April 1792) and the third peak is in
N ovem ber 1792 (quite a low point for antiseigneurial actions), rather than in
January 1790 when subsistence events only exhibit a small peak let T he July
1789 spike for tax events com prises 52 incidents, utterly eclipsing even the
nearest rival m onth o f February 1790 with its m ere eight. T he m ost intense
anti-tax stretch in 1792, m oreover, is not April (not even in the running with
its zero even ts) but July and August (each with a m ere 3 ). Land conflicts are
also highest in July 1789 with 43 events; the secondary peak is, like the
antiseigneurial disturbances, in April 1792 (but relatively larger, amounting
to som e 77% o f the main peak); and January 1790 is nothing m uch to speak
o f in the land-conflict arena (but there is a tertiary peak in N ovem ber 1792,
rather like the subsistence even ts). If the rhythm o f land conflicts differs
CBMtd on 1687 Evento)

NuaOer ol Evento
(Booed on 1212 Evento)

Hunter ol Evento
1788 1789 1790 1791 1792 1793
Subsistence Events
Fig. 6.2 (a) Incidence o f Rural Insurrection by Date
(Sostd on 767 Evonto)

Nuobor of Evonto
(Boootf on 198 Evonto)

Nunttor of Evoits
Fig. 6.2 (b) Incidence o f Rural Insurrection by Date

(Bosod on 393 Events)

Muabec of Events
1788 178« 1790 1 7 9 1 1 7 9 2 1793
Land Conflicts
(Bosod on 611 Events)

Q
400 -
Nuaber ol Events
100 -
10 - Qggggggggggg)
1788 178« 1790 1791 1792 1793
Panics
Fig. 6.2 (c) Incidence o f Rural Insurrection by Date
(Boood on 42 Evonto)
6 - o
\
Nuooor of Evonto
4 -
1788 1789 1790 1791 1792 1793
Wage Conflicts
(Boottf on 434 Evonto)

NuftDtr of Evonto
Counterrevolutionary Events
Fig. 6.2 (d) Incidence o f Rural Insurrection by Date
from antiseigneurialism in how large the April 1792 peak is com pared to the
great spike o f July 1789, the pattern for panics differs in precisely the
opposite direction. The July 1789 spike utterly overw helm s the distribution
o f panics, although there are little spikelets (virtual flyspecks on the graph)
a year later in the sum m er o f 1790, again in June 1791, and August 1792.
Summer is panic tim e in rural revolutionary France: the G reat Fear o f 1789
and the m inifears o f the next three sum m ers.
If these half-dozen series all peak in the first sum m er o f revolution
and— anti-tax events and panics apart— are strong in the spring o f 1792,
they also share another rhythm ic elem ent as w ell. T hey are small or
nonexistent in the early sum m er o f 1788, rise rapidly by M arch 1789, and
then, generally after a slight pause later in the spring, shoot w ay up in
sum m er. Although they fall o ff later that sum m er they maintain an erratic
but noticeable persistance until som etim e late in 1792 or early in 1793 (th ere
is a good deal o f variety on the tim ing o f this last turning point) and then fall
to very low levels by late spring o f ’93. Thus for six o f these eight m ajor
form s, the data exhibit a rapid rise, an erratic persistance, and then an
equally rapid and radical fall. (T he anti-tax even ts and panics deviate from
this pictu re.)
IW o o f the insurrectionary form s m ove to a different rhythm altogether.
W age events and counterrevolution are virtually nonexistent in our sam ple
w ell into 1790 and on the other hand rem ain notable w ell into 1793.
C ounterrevolutionary events begin to be felt late in 1790, grow slow ly (and
as usual erratically) until August 1792, after which they subside until their
strong peak in M arch 1793. (T hey may be headed for another rise when w e
cut the story o ff at the end o f June.) W age even ts are scarce; but they
totally fail to turn up in our sam ple before early in 1790. W hile their high
tim e in M arch and April 1792 is also a strong tim e for many o f the
insurrectionary form s, w age conflicts, like counterrevolution but unlike
other form s, are strong into 1793 (and perhaps are still rising at the end o f
our five-year period).
W hy this w eb o f sim ilarities and differences? If it is easy enough to see
July 1789 as a general crisis point in which m ost form s o f con flict flourished,
it is less obvious w hy April 1792 should be a second such point, m ore
striking for som e o f our series than the follow ing August. The rising o f
August 10, 1792, in the capital by Parisian militants and radicalized National
Guards from the provinces overturned the constitutionalized am biguity by
which royal authority and revolutionary legislature coexisted; the Republic
was inaugurated and, along with the Republic, the search for a new
constitution. The crisis o f the urban center had its rural and provincial
counterpart in the steep rise in incidents from July through Septem ber. Yet
in rural and provincial France, M arch and April w ere substantially m ore
explosive both in the aggregate statistics and for antiseigneurial, religious,
and land-conflict events (and, to a lesser degree, subsistence even ts as

w ell).56If som e, with an ey e on the center, speak o f August as the critical
point in a “ secon d revolution,”®what is April?
Table 6 .1 sum m arizes som e o f this concentration by pointing up the
degree to which one single month stands out few: every kind o f conflict— and
for m ost, it is the sam e m onth. It is true that there is variation h ere: panics,
follow ed by anti-tax events and then counterrevolution are m ore extrem ely
concentrated in a single month than the other event-types, but even the
least concentrated o f these others has m ore than a tenth o f all incidents in a
single m onth. T he analysis here confirm s the observations on the trajectory
o f all events to the effect that the sense o f opportunity and danger, altering
with great rapidity, m akes the incidence o f conflict tantalizingly unstable.
We may look at the sam e data from another angle. Rather than scrutinizing
the num bers o f events o f different sorts, let us take a look at the salience o f
different sorts o f events. The overall proportion o f events with an antisei
gneurial aspect, for exam ple, was seen (Table 5 .1 ) to be som ew hat m ore
than one-third. But is this constant through tim e, or is the proportion o f
antiseigneurial even ts som ething that shifts with (and perhaps shifts) the
Revolution? Figures 6 .3 (aM d ) present eight im ages o f salience for our
m ajor insurrectionary m odes. We see again, unsurprisingly, the rapid oscilla
tions, as before. But this tim e, the eight trajectories are far m ore distinctive
in appearance.
We may think o f the rise and fall o f contestation o f various sorts as
com posed o f tw o com ponents— a general propensity for open conflict o f all
sorts, bom out o f a conjunction o f opportunity and m obilizational capacity
that nurtures a w ide spectrum o f actions (as in July 1789) and circum stances
that favor specific form s o f action but not others. B y shifting from exam ining
the num bers to examining the proportions o f events o f particular sorts, w e
are, in effect, rem oving the com m on elem ent, thereby generating a m ore
individualized set o f graphs. In spite o f the saw tooth pattem , the salience o f
antiseigneurial actions exhibits a fairly clear pattern o f rise and falL The
proportion o f even ts directed against the seigneurial rights is zero in the
sum m er o f 1788, then begins to rise in N ovem ber and rem ains high until the
late spring o f 1792 (apart from a drastic fall in autumn 1791). From that
point it falls, at first sharply, and then, after a brief Septem ber upsurge,
m ore slow ly and irregularly. Som e o f the high points o f peasant action are
5. One hesitates to make too much of the data on the scarce wage conflicts, but the shape of
their trajectory abo stresses the spring rather than the summer of 1792.
6. See, for example, the concurrence of two scholars more often noted for their differences
than their commonalities: Albert Soboul, The French Revolution, 1787-1799: From the Storming of
the Bastille to Napoleón (New York; Vintage Books, 1975), 251; François Furet, La Révolution de
Titreot àJules Ferry, 1770-1880 (Paris: Hachette, 1988), 123.
.« -
.8 -
.7 -
Proportion of Evonto
.6 -
.5 -
.4 ■
.3 -
.2 ■
.1 -
17&0 Ït S 1790 ¡791 1792 ¡793
Proportion o( E von to
llS 1789 1790 1791 1792 1793
Subsistence Events
Fig. 6.3 (a) Proportions o f Rural Insurrection by Date
.8 -
.7 -
Proportion of Events
.6 -
.5 -
.4 -
.3 -
.2 ■
.1 -
1788 1789 1790 1791 1792 1793
Events with Religious Aspect

Proportion of Evonts
Fig. 6.3 (b) Proportions o f Rural Insurrection by Date

Proportion of Events Rhythms op Contention 285
Et S b Ït K Ït S o 1791 11792 1793
Land Conflicts
Proportion of Evento
Fig. 6.3 (c) Proportions o f Rural Insurrection by Date

1755 1789 1790 ît SÎ Ï7S2 Ï7S3

Counterrevolutionary Events
Fig. 6.3 (c) Proportions o f Rural Insurrection by Date
overw helm ingly antiseigneuriaL In January 1790, 87% o f all events have an
antiseigneurial character; in April 1792, 73% .
T he gross trend in the salience o f subsistence events resem bles the
inverse o f the antiseigneurial pattem . Figures 6 .3 (a H d ) show that in the
sum m er o f 1788, alm ost all events w ere oriented to the provision or price
o f food . Subsistence issues began to share the spotlight in N ovem ber; by
the follow ing M arch they had fallen to som e 68% and in June they w ere still
holding strong at 56% . The initial slow falloff in the salience o f subsistence
issues over the first 13 m onths o f our sam ple then gave w ay to a precipitous
decline, down in one m onth to 14% . Even after the dropoff at the beginning
o f the sum m er o f 1789, there w ere still a num ber o f m onths in which half or
m ore o f all even ts w ere over food issues: Septem ber 1789 (50% ), M ay 1790
(60% ), and a long autumn o f 1792 with 60% , 73% , and even 79% in O ctober,
N ovem ber, and D ecem ber respectively. On the other hand, there w ere also
a num ber o f m onths w ith few or no subsistence events. Although rather
less num erous overall than antiseigneurial events (see Table 5 .1 ) there w ere
nonetheless nineteen m onths in which they w ere at least half o f all events
and thereby constituted the dominant form o f social struggle.
T o pursue the significance o f subsistence events for a m om ent, they not
only outnum bered all other form s o f conflict com bined during a (discontinu
ous) year and a half o f the Revolution but they w ere also, to recall Table 5.1
again, quite w idespread, second only to panics in their geographic range.
T hey w ere notably less restricted than antiseigneurial events in the num ber
o f bailliages in which they occurred. In their tem poral sequencing for France
as a w hole, subsistence events seem virtually the forerunners o f the entire
rural explosion. T hey constituted a w idely understood repository o f form s
o f contentious action on which m obilizations directed against other targets
m ight draw. T hey played a role in the unraveling o f the Old Regim e by
dem onstrating a national m ovem ent o f opposition by popular forces at the
very instant that the elite struggles led to the political stalem ate and the
desperate im provisations to break that stalem ate that culm inated in the
convocation o f the E states-G eneral.7 In the con text o f that convocation, as
7. Not to exaggerate: the summer events of 1788 are not exclusively subsistence-oriented. A
amal number indeed show a considerable involvement in national politics through participation in
the intra-ehte conflicts that have come to be known as the “prerevohition.” At the very beginning
of our tone-frame, for example, country people participated in the resistance to the last attempt of
the monarchy to ride roughshod over what ministers who identified with some notion of state-
promoted progress tended to see as judicial obstructionism. The desperate abolition of the powerful
paiements in May 1788 triggered disturbances a month later, two of which entered our sample
because of significant rural participation (even though the location of the struggle was the town that
housed the court). Peasants from surrounding villages, in Grenoble for Saturday market on June 7,
1788, armed themselves with rocks, hatchets, pitchforks, and anoccasional gun andjoined together
with townspeople in resisting the royal troops sent to enforce the letters that had arrived that
morning ordering the judges into exile. In the Pyrenees a dozen days later, people from the
the reality o f the E states-G eneral cam e to the fore, other form s o f rural
action begin to displace the subsistence event from its dominant role. M ost
dram atically, the antiseigneurial m ovem ent cam e into its ow n.
T he rural insurrections w ere at on ce causes, sym ptom s, and con se
quences o f the breakdown o f the political and m oral authority o f the Old
Regim e: causes, in that it strained the resou rces o f those on high to deploy
either benefits or coercion (and thereby insurrections intensified the intra
elite conflict since strategies for dealing with popular upheaval differed);
sym ptom s, in that the failure to contain popular violence through alleviation,
distraction, appeals to m orality, and fear o f repression, dem onstrated to the
elites them selves that som ething new w as essential; and consequences, in
that elite division and elite innovation (them selves in part reactions to
popular threat) provided both opportunity and encouragem ent for further
grassroots m obilization. In this p rocess, by which popular action helped
crack the sinew s o f the Old Regim e, the subsistence disturbances consti
tuted the m ajor elem ent, if to a decreasing degree after the autumn o f 1788.
In changing the param eters within which they m obilized, the patterns o f
m obilization them selves changed and other form s o f popular action began
to flourish.
Different Targets, Different Rhythms

L et us return to the question o f the shift in peasant insurrection from
prim arily antifiscal and subsistence-oriented to prim arily antiseigneuriaL
Peasant action was not overw helm ingly antiseigneurial as the Revolution
com m enced; it becam e so. T here are not only structures o f action but
p rocesses. Explanation, then, will require m ore than explaining an inherently
antiseigneurial countryside forged by long-term historical change; w e need
as w ell to identify p rocesses by which the countryside cam e to ch oose
antiseigneurial action. Long-term p rocesses generating antiseigneurial griev
ances are essential— our entire analysis o f the cahiers show s this (see
Chapters 2 and 3)— but they are only a part o f the story.
The predom inantly antiseigneurial thrust o f revolutionary French peasant
insurrection was not achieved by the slow evolution o f institutions during
the eighteenth century and ju st waiting for the revolutionary opportunity to
reveal itself. N or did it em erge instantaneously and full-blow n out o f nothing.
countryside around Pau attempted to seize artillery pieces in order to force the reopenmg of the
parlement For Pau, see Anatoly V. Ado, Krtsfianskoe dvizkenie no Frantsü vo premia veUkoi
burzkaznoi revoliutsii kontsa XVIII veka (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo Moskovskovo Universitéta, 1971),
78; for Grenoble, see ViaDet, "Lajournée des tuiles: Accident de l’histoire ou première manifestation
politique populaire à la veille de 1789?” in Vital Chomel, ed., Les débuts de la Révolutionfrançaise en
Dauphiné, 1788-1791 (Grenoble: Presses Universitaires de Grenoble, 1988), 72-85.
W hile absent until late in 1788, it grew . We need, then, to look for nurturant
structures and p rocesses, both. Antiseigneurial events m oreover are tar
m ore characteristic o f som e regions than others (41% o f bailliages according
to Table 5 .1 ). We shall ask which w ere the antiseigneurial regions (and
which regions w ere antiseigneurial w hen?) and shall be able to use spatial
variations to stand in for institutional ones (see Chapter 7). But how ever
much som e regions (at som e tim es) w ere favorable soil and others w ere
inhibiting, the antiseigneurial m ovem ent w as not sim ply there, fully devel
oped, not in even the m ost favorable s o il It grew and w e need to try to
identify the grow th-prom oting p rocess.
T he evidence presented thus far bears on another discussion am ong
historians, one m ore m arked, on the w hole by statem ents o f opinion than
by deploym ent o f evidence. What sort o f consciousness o f political p rocess,
if any, did the peasantry bring to the Revolution? H istorians' opinion
ranges from the view that the peasants harbored profound antipathy to
seigneurabsm in all its form s to a view that they endured it with utter
apathy. For G eorges L efebvre, “ that these obligations, far m ore than the
royal taxes, w ere execrated unanimously by the w hole peasantry cannot be
doubted and w as to be proved by experien ce.”8 For William D oyle, “ even
am ong the peasantry w ho bore m ost o f the burden, feudal rights w ere
scarcely questioned spontaneously.”9 In consequence, historians have dif
fered deeply am ong them selves on what, if anything, the countryside
contributed to the Revolution. For G eorges L efebvre, the peasants collec
tively w ere a m ajor shaper o f events: “Against the aristocracy the peasants
had far m ore substantial grievances than did the people o f the cities, and it
is natural, th erefore, that they took it upon them selves to deal the blow by
which the aristocracy w as laid low .” 10 Donald Sutherland’s summary o f
1789, (Hi the other hand, asserts that “ the Revolution was largely an urban
phenom enon.” 111 2In the long run, contends Sutherland, the peasantry w ere
actually a brake on revolution: “ In the end, therefore, the vast w eight o f
ancient peasant France im posed itself upon the governm ent at the expense
o f many o f the ideals o f 1789. G eorge Taylor sees the peasants as
contributing next to nothing to revolutionary radicalism . W hen they express
8. See Georges Lefebvre, TheComingoftheFrenchRevolution (Princeton: Princeton University

Press, 1967), 142.
9. Wffiam Doyle, OrigmsoftheFrenchRevobtihm (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1960), 198.
10. Lefebvre, ComingoftheFrettch Revolution, 142.
11. Sutherland, France, 1789-1815. RevolutionandCounterrevolution (NewYork: OxfordUniver
sity Press, 1986), 439.
12. Ibid., 442. The Sutherland quotes are, I believe, fair summary statements of the tone of the
conducting chapter of this survey of the Revolution from which I extracted them; however, the
argument of the entire book assigns the peasantry a far more active andcomplex part thanindicated
their view s, he w rites, one sees "d ocility.” W herever the Revolution’s
ideas cam e from , it surely w as not, Taylor argues forcefully, the French
countryside.13 A lfred Cobban, on the other hand, sees the peasants as
precisely the force that pushed a conservative revolutionary leadership into
taking action.1* Guy Lem archand, addressing those subsistence even ts in
which m onasteries or châteaux w ere attacked, suggests that the radicalism
o f peasant doings outran their thoughts: “ T h us,” he w rites, “ these popular
risings, intending first o f all to seize grain w herever it w as found, cam e to
challenge the entire social system o f the epoch without the rebels deariy
realizing i t ” 15 So the peasants hated the regim e or never questioned it
T hey delivered the Old Regim e’s death blow or they w ere docile. T hey
received the blessings o f the Revolution from the bourgeoisie and, indeed,
w ere even a brake on urban radicalism or they forced the hand o f a
conservative governing elite. T hey knew what they w ere doing or they
challenged the social order without realizing it The various claim s o f what
the peasants brought to the Revolution are thoroughly contradictory.
T he changing pattern o f peasant unrest that our data present suggests
that this issue has not been w ell posed, for the peasants brought different
things to the Revolution at different tim es (and places). Initially they brought
subsistence concerns, which w ere increasingly displaced by antiseigneurial
ones (although the insurrectionary calendar w as still punctuated by m onths
in which subsistence events dom inated). The antiseigneurial even ts, I shall
argue below , buttressed the critique o f “feudalism ” participated in by so
many o f the new national revolutionary elite. In this sen se, the thinking o f
the peasantry— not just their em pty bellies, traditional m entalities, em otional
reactions— the thinking that underlies their analyses o f the seigneurial
regim e that w e have seen in the cahiers played a part in defining the R evo
lution.
This, in turn, brings us to a m ore general level o f con troversy that has
raged for som e tim e am ong com parative students o f revolution. Is peasant
participation understood to be creative, to em body p rojects and program s,
to be consciously political? O r, on the other hand, is peasant action to be
understood prim arily, if perhaps significantly, as destructive, requiring
either a revolutionary party to contain and channel it or an ideological
reconstruction by strategically located intellectuals to give a revolution
m eaning and direction? In his im portant w ork, Agrarian Revolution,16 for
13. George V. Täytor, “Revolutionary and Nonrevohitionary Content in the Cahiers of 1789,”
French HistoricalStudies 7 (1972): 495.
15. Guy Lemarchand, “Les troubles de subsistance dans la généralité de Caen (seconde moitié
du XVÜIe siècle),” Annales Historiques de ta Révolution Française 35 (1963): 413.
16. Jeffery M. Paige, Agrarian Revolution: Social Movements and Export Agriculture m Ote
Underdeveloped World (New York: Free Press, 1975).
Rhythms op Contention 291
exam ple, Jeffery Paige vigorously defended a notion o f peasant revolutionär*

ies as self-con sciou s adherents to a program o f social change. B y w ay o f
contrast, Jam es S cott, in The Moral Economy of the Peasant, 17 urged us to
see peasant action as overw helm ingly shaped by bedrock survival concerns
and only marginally concerned with m ost o f what preoccupies triumphant
parties. S cott’s peasants make revolution by constituting the arm ies that
overcom e the Old Regim e; they thereby are the vehicle ridden by others to
their ow n purposes, often to the bitter disappointm ent and som etim es the
arm ed enm ity o f the very rural forces that overthrew the old order.
Paige’s peasant revolutionaries, on the other hand, do m ore than break the
fram ew ork o f the old o rd e r they participate in framing the vision o f the
new . Our data suggest that, in the case o f France, som ething o f both may
be at w ork. The subsistence revolts o f the sum m er and fall o f 1789 (and
beyond) helped w reck the Old Regim e, w ithout providing a coherent im age
o f a new order. (And, indeed, it would be hard to make out that the eventual
new order, o f unified national m arkets and substantial abandonm ent o f Old
Regim e provisioning policy, would be seen by many as unam biguously in
accord w ith rural popular d esires.) But if all form s o f peasant action
contributed to cracking the old order, the shift tow ard antiseigneurial action
suggests another role as w ell, a defining role.
Subsistence even ts w ere the initial point o f departure for the national
m ovem ent, by opening the w ay, on a national scale, to the em ergence o f
other goals and other form s o f action .18 But how did the transition to other
form s o f action, especially antiseigneurial actions, com e about? O ne possible
vehicle was through the reactions o f antagonists. A s various authorities
responded to rising subsistence disturbances with con cession s, as repres
sive attem pts proved unequal to the scale o f the disturbances in light o f the
m ilitary w eaknesses o f the twilight o f the Old Regim e, it may w ell be the
case that those with other goals in mind took heart and began to m ove into
action .19 T h ere is a second possible path from subsistence events to other
challenges. Did the experience, locally, o f m ounting food riots, m arket
invasions, transportation blockages, and dom iciliary visits in search o f
17. James C. Scott, The Moral Economy of the Passant: Rebellion and Subsistence m Southeast
Asia (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976).
18. Ado has pointed to the early subsistence struggles as the opening wedge for the antiseigneur-
ial events to come. One of his sections is titled “From the Struggle for Bread to the Attack on the
Bases of Feudalism.” See Krestianskoe dviekenie, 74,87.
19. Divisions on appropriate government policy in the political crisis that opposed many to the
monarchy in conjunction with the blocked careers within the military of many junior officers of
commoner or provincial noble background was makingthe military an unreliable instrument in urban
confrontations. Nonetheless the army continued to be generally reliable in subsistence disturbances
and antiseigneurial events in the countryside. See Samuel F. Scott, The Response of the RoyalArmy
to theFrench Revolution: TheRoleandDevelopmentoftheLineArmy, 1787-1793 (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1978), 78-79.
hoarded grain provide a significant seedbed in which further m obilization

could grow ? D ifferently put, did the subsistence action encourage m obiliza
tion for other ends largely through decreasing state coercion and bringing
on a general revolution, within which various locally based com munal
m obilizations w ere facilitated? O r did a local subsistence action provide a
local inspiration and a local experience out o f which grew local m obilizations
for other ends? Put yet another way: did subsistence actions m erely open
the w ay for other actions— or did they also evolve into other actions?
If the tem poral patterning raises the possibility o f subsistence even ts as a
sort o f grounding from which later events o f various sorts may have sprung,
a com parison o f the anti-tax and counterrevolutionary events, returning now
to Figures 6 .3 (a H d ), is also intriguing. The proportion o f anti-tax even ts
rises sw iftly after M arch 1789 and after reaching its first peak in O ctober
attains its highest point— a bit under one-fifth o f all events— in M arch 1790
and then, after passing through another peak late in the year rem ains small
to nonexistent for alm ost the entire rem ainder o f our period.20 But it is ju st
at the end o f 1790 that recognizably counterrevolutionary even ts com e into
their ow n, attaining their apogee o f 87% o f all events in M ardi 1793.
Could it be the case that the anti-tax events w ere the forerunners o f the
recognizably counterrevolutionary m obilizations? In Chapter 7 1 shall explore
w hether or not localities that at an early point experienced subsistence or
anti-tax events are the localities in which other form s o f con flict later
flourished (see pp. 41 1 -1 7 ).
The juxtaposition o f the tim ing o f the counterrevolutionary even ts and
other form s o f con flict casts an interesting light on another juxtaposition as
w ell, perhaps surprisingly so. The tim ing o f w age conflicts is rather sim ilar
to that o f counterrevolution: virtually nothing until w ell into 1790, a drop in
1791, follow ed by a peak tow ard the end o f that year; a drastic falloff early
in 1792, follow ed by a m idyear upsurge;21 and finally a fall at the end o f 1792
follow ed by a sharp rise in early 1793. Is this m ere coincidence, perhaps a
fluke due to the low num bers o f w age conflicts? O r is there som e intercon
nection? I p ose the hypothesis that the connection is rooted in the sim ilar
causal m atrix o f the tw o. The counterrevolution was in part a reaction to
20. Note that anti-tax events drop off after a wave of suppressions of the indirect taxes in late
1790 and early 1791. This is an important and welcome sign of validity of our data. The indirect
taxes were either radically reformed or slated for abolition through various enactments, culminating
in the suppression of the General Farms by the laws of March 5 and March 20, 1791. See AP
23:292-93, 670-72; AP 24:222-23; George T. Matthews, The Royal GeneralFarms mEighteenth-
Century France (New York: Columbia University Press, 1958), 278.
21. The rise in wage disputes in 1792 may in part be explicable by the deteriorating currency
(the assignai) and concomitant price rises. But this would not explain the precise timing very wdL
See Yvonne Crebouw, “Les salariés agricoles face au maximum des salaires," m La Révolution
française et le monde rural (Paris: Editions du Comité des Travaux Historiques et Scientifiques,
1989), 113-14.
the attem pt o f the endangered Republic to conscript young villagers into

F rance's arm ies. T he tim ing o f counterrevolution responds w ith great
sensitivity to the m om ents at which new and threatening steps are taken.
N ot that France’s w age laborers w ere the strike force o f counterrevolu
tionary struggle. The w age-labor sector, often m igratory, often foreign to
the com m unity in which they labored, often tied to urban entrepreneurs for
part o f the year, w ere not likely to be part o f communal resistance to the
new revolutionary order, w ere less likely to m iss the old priests, less likely
to be loyal to the old elites, and also less likely to be com petitors with urban
landgrabbers for the form er church holdings now up for sale. (A ll o f these
propositions have been suggested by historians recently as part o f the
nexus o f counterrevolution).22 N onetheless, precisely as outsiders, itinerant
laborers may have been likely to have their nam es turned over to the
governm ent by solidary com m unities that could designate which o f their
sons would go to war. H ow tem pting it was not to name their sons at all,
but to list instead migrant w orkers, tem porarily resid en t And if they did
name their sons, why not name those w ho in their turn had m igrated
elsew here seeking em ploym ent, w ho, with a little hick, m ight never be
picked up by the cop s?23 So the threat o f conscription may have cem ented
ties betw een draft evaders and their ow n com m unities, a staple o f the
literature cm conscription; but, by the sam e token, conscription m ay have
exacerbated the relations o f solidary com m unities and m arginalized laborers.
(I know o f no adequate study o f this p rocess.) Thus the sam e m om ents that
triggered counterrevolution may also have decreased w hatever tendencies
might have em erged for laborers to tolerate low w ages.
But conscription meant m ore than a rupture o f social bonds betw een
marginal w orkers and stable peasant em ployers.24 C onscription decreased
the labor force in the countryside both directly, by placing young m en in the
arm ies, and indirectly, by sending large num bers o f young m en into the
forests and mountains to hide from the recruiting sergeants. That is to say,
22. See Paul Bois, Paysans de ÍOuest Des structures économiquesetsociales aux optionspolitiques
depuis Fépoque révolutionnaire dans la Sarthe (Le Mans: Imprimerie M. VBaire, 1960); Timothy
Tackett, “The West in France in 1789. The Religious Factor inthe Origins of the Counterrevolution,”
Journal of Modem History 54 (1982): 714-45; Charles Tily, The Vendée (Cambridge: Harvard
23. In a part of Limousin known for exporting migratory stoneworkers, one finds communities
that opted to elect the villagers to send in response to the levy of 300,000 ci March 1793 and that
then put together lists of young village men who were nowhere to be found. See Paul dHoOander,
“La levée des trois cent mile hommes en Haute-Vienne (mars 1793),” Annales du Midi 101
(1989): 78-79.
24. The pressure of conscription mayalso sometimes have hardenedvilage dass divisions rather
than reinforced village solidarity against outsiders. The better-off or worse-off villagers seem to
sometimes have feared that the other group would use the conscription rules against it (See
¿Hollander, "La levée des trois cent mille,” 77-78, for several such incidents.)
the strike, not the easiest o f tools to w iekl within the social structure o f the
French countryside,25 suddenly becam e a far m ore profound threat and a
far m ore potent social w eapon. Thus, it is in the wake o f the great
counterrevolutionary explosion o f M arch 1793 that w age disputes rise
rapidly. C onsider one com m unity at the very tail end o f our period, June 29,
1793. On that date, the agricultural laborers o f the Alpine com m unity o f S t
H ilaire-de-B rens dem anded that m eals be provided by their em ployers and
that they be paid even when bad w eather ¡»ev en ted w ork. T hey further
announced that they would hang any new com ers w ho sought low er w ages.
Should the ow ners refu se, they w ent on, they would harvest the crops
anyway and take their ow n pay. Surely Jean N icolas is right when he reads
this tough talk as the sudden confidence o f w orkers m ade hard to replace by
wartim e labor shortages.26 T he capacity o f agricultural w orkers to press
w ages upward is show n in the w age statistics sum m arized by L eG off
and Sutherland.27
One final com parison am ong the trajectories is suggestive. A do contends
that conflicts over food and land coincide. A do sees land conflicts and
subsistence events alike as form s o f rural class struggle bom in sim ilar
circum stances o f want and opportunity.28 Returning to Figures 6 .2 (a H d )
and Table 6.1 w e can see that there is indeed much sim ilarity, but not
identity, in the tim ing o f the three m ajor spikes: Sum m er 1789, Spring
1792, and Autumn 1792. But som e o f this coincidence com es from these
being generally favorable tim es for many form s o f insurrection. W hen w e
explore the trajectories o f proportions o f events (F igs. 6 .3 [a H d ]) w e see
that the curves are quite different, with the proportion o f land con flicts
irregularly rising until early 1791 and the proportion o f subsistence events
even m ore irregularly M in g. Halfway through 1792, how ever, the tw o
curves do m erge and are quite similar for the last year o f our data s e t This
is, I suggest, because the nature o f land conflicts shifted. A t first, as will be
developed in Chapter 8 (see p. 482) land conflicts had a very strong
25. Work-gangs of some half-dozen or so laborers, often formed around a common place of
origin, seem to have had enough solidarity so that work-gang leaders could plan a work stoppage,
lb secure sufficient solidarity across separate work-gangs to persuade (or frighten) other laborers
into halting work would seem quite difficult in a period of substantial population pressure and no
legal recognition of any sort of rural laborers' associations. (The whole arena seems to be largely
historical terra incognita.)
26. jean Nicolas, La Révolution française dans Its alpes: Dauphiné et Savoie, 1789-1799 (Tou
louse: Privat, 1989), 194. The government dearly worried about how to ameliorate the impact of
war-induced labor shortages. See Octave Festy, L’agriculture pendant la Révolutionfrançaise: Les
conditions de production et de récolte des céréales; Etude d’histoire économique, 1789-1795 (Paris:
Gallimard, 1947), 164-268.
27. Timothy J. A. LeGoff and Donald M. G. Sutherland, “The Revolution and the Rural
Economy,” in Alan Forrest and Peter M. Jones, eds., ReshapingFrance: Ibwn, Country andRegion
During the French Revolution (Manchester Manchester University Press, 1991), 72.
28. Ado, Kresfianskoedvizhenie, 199-200.
antiseigneurial thrust, and as such w ere the w ork o f fairly unified peasant
com m unities; then as antiseigneurial actions began to fall alter the spring o f
1792, the antiseigneurial side o f land conflicts falls away as welL T he
spurt o f battles over land in fall 1792 w ere largely struggles within rural
com m unities, pitting those w ithout enough land against the better endow ed;
these later land battles probably had participant profiles very similar to those
o f food conflicts (see Chapter 5, p. 247) and, w e see h ere, very similar
tem poral rhythm s as w ell
Peak Times and Quiet Times

A series o f peaks, then; peasant action com es in w aves. D o the even ts o f
the turbulent m onths differ from those o f the peaceful tim es other than in
their quantity? L et us consider as peak tim es those m onths w ith at least 75
even ts and as quiet tim es those with 28 or few er. Table 6 .2 show s that
there are indeed som e differences. Panics are alm ost com pletely confined
to the peak periods. Since such a large proportion o f all panic even ts took
place in one single m onth—July 1789 (see Table 6 .1 )— this is perhaps not
very inform ative about the pattern o f peaks and troughs as a w hole. M ore
interesting is the com parison o f antiseigneurial and subsistence even ts: the
form er rises in high tim es and the latter falls. This table suggests then, that
to the extent that a peak is driven by a particular sort o f event, overall, it
will be the ebb and flow o f antiseigneurial actions that w e should watch for.
Such an aggregation may cover too much ground. L et us consider each
peak episode separately. B y a peak episode in Table 6 .3 ,1 m ean a sequence
o f contiguous m onths each o f which has at least 75 even ts. A peak m onth
Ih b le 6 .2 . Forms o f Insurrection in Periods o f Peak Activity and in Quiet Periods (% )
Type o f Event
(Broad Categories) Peak Periods* Quiet Periods6
Antiseigneurial 38% 24%

Religious 15 14
Anti-tax 3 4
Subsistence 23 39
Land conflict 6 13
Wage conflict 1 3
Panic 18 1
Counterrevolution 7 13
(AO (3.294) (397)
"Months with 75 or more events.

bMonths with 28 or fewer events.
and peak day w ill be the month and day within an episode w ith the largest
num ber o f even ts. For each peak episode, and for each peak m onth and
peak day within that episode, w e may com pute the frequencies o f the
various form s o f insurrection. Table 6 .3 displays the percentages for all
form s that reach 20% for at least one am ong the triad o f episode, m onth,
and day. The significance o f antiseigneurial events stands out again. O f the
nine peak episodes identified, antiseigneurial events w ere the dominant form
in five; and they are a secondary focu s o f action in another tw o. Ttoo o f the
peak periods (M arch-M ay 1789 and N ovem ber 1792) w ere dom inated by
subsistence events, which w ere also a secondary com ponent during the
February-April 1792 w ave. Panic, as w e expected, w as only a m ajor force
in the sum m er o f 1789 (w ith a strong b oost from antiseigneurial actions) and
counterrevolution dom inated the explosion o f M arch 1793.
For som e o f these peak periods, narrowing the focu s to a single m onth or
even a single day, sharpens the picture. If w e focus cm the peak o f peaks o f
the entire five-year span (July 27, 1789) w e find that nearly tw o-thirds o f
the events on that day w ere panics. The peak day in the early 1790 w ave
(January 24, 1790), was one in which every event in the data collection had
an antiseigneurial character; it w as also a day on which an unusually large
proportion o f those antiseigneurial events involved actions directed against
ecclesiastical targets (39% ). The high day o f the wave o f June 1791 w as also
com pletely antiseigneurial. O ne other peak day, April 5, 1792, was also
overw helm ingly antiseigneurial with a substantial group o f ecclesiastical
targets. Sim ilarly, the peak days within the subsistence-dom inated w ave o f
N ovem ber 1792 and the counterrevolution-dom inated w ave o f M arch 1793
w ere even m ore subsistence-oriented or prone to counterrevolutionary
events than those episodes as a w hole.
One final table (Table 6 .4 ) approaches the alternation in salience o f
different form s o f contestation. If w e consider each o f the 61 m onths our
data covers, w e may ask how often did it happen that particular form s o f
rural action predom inated? We again find that antiseigneurial actions w ere
the leading form o f turbulence in a bit under half the m onths covered and
that subsistence conflicts constitute a close second, w ith religious con flicts,
counterrevolution, land conflicts, and panics, in that order, trailing far
behind. T h ere is no single m onth in which w age conflicts dom inate, bearing
out again the often repeated contention that prices rather than w ages
w ere central to eighteenth-century collective m obilizations. Perhaps m ore
surprisingly, there is not a single m onth in which the tone o f insurrection
was set by anti-tax actions.29
29. Although we have seen good reason to treat the anti-tax data with a certain reserve, it does
seem very reasonable upon examination, that the combination of acceptance of the state (with
whatever degree of resignation), support for the Revolution, and—for those who wished not to
pay—the ease of evasion adequately account for the low number of events; see Chapter 5.
M ie 6.3. Most Common Forms of Insurrection During Peak Episodes, Peak Months, and Peak Days (%)
1
M
S
gSSS
M
I
S
g 8 | ß ä a
* 8 2
8
Forms of insurrection characterizing at least 20% of the events of at least one among a peak episode, a month, or a day.
1 June and 9 June 1790were tied as peak day. I based the computations on aggregating the events of both days.
Ih b le 6 .4 . Number o f Months in Which a Type o f Event Is

M ost Common
T\pe o f Event Number o f Months

(Broad Categories) as M ost Common Event
Antiseigneurial 25
Religious 5
Anti-tax 0
Subsistence 22V4
Land conflict 2Yi
Wage conflict 0
Counterrevolution 4
Panic 2
Note: If two categories are tied in a part*~1|brmonth, each gets M.
W e may sum m arize this survey o f the changing targets o f rural m obiliza
tion. A large num ber o f m onths saw antiseigneurial actions in the ascendant
and an alm ost equally large num ber w ere led by subsistence even ts. During
the m om ents o f m ost intense conflict, how ever, antiseigneurial even ts w ere
the m ost generally characteristic feature o f rural struggles. But the makeup
o f each particular peak is distinctive. The greatest peak o f all is dom inated
by panics. T he antiseigneurial aspect o f som e o f the peaks is in part
com posed o f assaults on ecclesiastical establishm ents but this is not the
case o f other strongly antiseigneurial m onths. Subsistence even ts are a
secondary them e o f som e o f the antiseigneurial w aves, and they actually
dom inate antiseigneurialism in the spring o f 1789 and totally eclipse it in
N ovem ber 1792; and, o f cou rse, counterrevolution is the source o f the
actions o f the early spring o f 1793.
We have, all in all, ebbs and flow s here, not a m onolithic m ovem ent If w e
had to focu s cm one single elem ent, w e would get furthest by seeking to
understand the surges o f antiseigneurial action. But w e would do better to
notice the special features o f each w ave: the degree to which som e o f the
peaks are dom inated by other sorts o f even ts, the degree to which the
antiseigneurial w aves share the stage with other form s o f conflict and
the degree to which antiseigneurial events at som e points (but not oth ers)
are sim ultaneously directed at religiously defined targets. Perhaps this
overall point can be made m ore sharply with an im age. Figure 6 .4 reiterates
Figure 6 .1 , but this tim e displaying the types o f action characteristic o f the
graph's spikes. If w e think o f each peak separately as constituting a research
agenda, w e can also suggest that the depth o f historical research into th ese
high points varies considerably. G eorges L efebvre's research on the panic-
dom inated spike o f late July-early August 1789 still stands as a m asterpiece,
som e six decades after its appearance.30 The counterrevolutionary outbreak
30. Lefebvre, La Gnauk Peur.

o f M arch 1793 is by now virtually a field o f research all its ow n.31 O ther
spikes lack a full synthetic treatm ent, although som e have been covered in
im portant regional research. Both the early w inter w ave o f 1790 and the
spring w ave o f 1792 have been m arvelously analyzed in their Lim ousin
m anifestation by Jean B outier,32 for exam ple. H ow to understand the pattern
o f ebb and flow as a w hole, how ever, is a task still to be done: w hy do
particular even ts assum e the salient role they do at particular points in tim e
and— to m ention a subject not yet broached— space? (see Chapter 7).
Peak Episodes Day by Day

T he m onth-by-m onth trajectories across five years o f revolution that w e
have been exploring are vital tools for focusing the vision o f scholarly
hindsight; these trajectories are essential for revealing the w ay in which
social structures and revolutionary events interacted to produce shifting
patterns o f confrontation. T h ose w ho lived through these even ts, w ho
participated in popular challenge or w ho feared being the targets o f this
challenge, w ere surely responding on a different rhythm . W hen a villager
joined his fellow s after the Sunday serm on to plan som e significant action,
there w as likely to be a specific day involved that very w eek— often, indeed,
that very afternoon or evening. T h ose who follow ed the progress o f
insurrection w ere not collectin g aggregated statistics, but hearing the hot
new s with anxiety or excitem ent, incident by incident, day by day. L et us
see what these peak tim es w ere like from day to day. L et us start w ith the
utterly unique peak o f the sum m er o f 1789 and chart the occu rren ce o f
events for July and A ugust Figure 6 .5 show s that during the first half o f
July the num ber o f events taking place each day was rising ever so gradually
31. Mqor recent work indudes: TiHy, The Vendit; Bois, Paysans de TOuest; Sutherland, The
Chouans: The Social Origins ofPopular Cotatter-Revolution m UpperBrittany, 1770-1796 (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1982); Claude Petitfrère, La Vendée et les vendéens (Paris: Gallimard, 1981); Jean-
Clément Martin, La Vendée et la France (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1987); Roger Dupuy, De la
Révolution à la Chouannerie: Paysans en Bretagne, 1788-1794 (Paris: Flammarion, 1988); Timothy
J. A. LeGoff, Vannes and its Region: A Study of Town and Country in Eighteenth-Century France
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981); Maurice Hutt, Chouannerie and Counter-Revolution: Puisaye, the
Princes and the British Government m the 1790s (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983);
Timothy Tackett, Religion, Revolution and Regional Culture in Eighteenth-Century France: The
Ecclesiastical Oath of 1791 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986). An older, less thought
fully analytic but more event-packed literature includes: Charles-Louis Chassin, La préparation de
laguerre de Vendée, 1789-1793 (Paris: Imprimerie Paul Dupont, 1892) and Célestin Port, La Vendée
angevine: Les origines—Cinsurrtction (janvier 1789-31 mars 1793) (Paris: Hachette, 1888).
32. Jean Boutier, Campagnes en émoi: Révoltes et Révolution en bas-Limousin, 1789-1800
Cfreignac: Editions "Les Monédières,” 1987).
(Based on 4689 Events) antiseigneurial 73%

religious 22%
N u mb er of Events
until the m iddle o f the month when it began to rise m uch m ore steeply,
appearing to level o ff at quite a high level o f turbulence around July 22 w here
it hovered for four days at the enorm ous level o f about 60 events each day,
and then precipitously rose to som e 145 separate events on July 27, a height
from which it dropped back over the next w eek to the pre-spike drum beat
o f several incidents a day for the rem ainder o f A ugust B y the tim e the
deputies resolved to announce the dismantling o f the feudal regim e chi the
fam ous night o f August 4, the crisis had already passed. (O r, a bit m ore
precisely, the crisis had returned to its normal level for the revolutionary
epoch: the steady expectation o f several incidents a day, while far less
dram atic than the 145 incidents o f July 27, still constituted a chronic pressure
cm those w ho sought the regeneration o f the kingdom .) Is this sim ply an
irony? We shall consider in Chapter 8 (see p. 437) the question o f how and
when the deputies at the National A ssem bly heard o f the rural explosion.
The other peak periods do not have the sam e extrem e spike that
characterizes July 1789. Figures 6 .6 (a M d ) show that none o f the other
peak days tow ers so strongly over its m onth, nor do w e have any rise quite
so precipitous. Perhaps the sharpest rise shown in the other peak periods
is the dram atic explosion o f counterrevolution on M arch 10,179 3. Although,
Number of Events Rhythms op Contention 301
as w e have ju st seen, what m ade the peak periods generally w as a surge in

antiseigneurial actions, the tw o m ost m arked spikes, when considered on a
daily basis, w ere in large part not antiseigneurial: the G reat Fear o f July
1789 and the counterrevolutionary explosion o f M arch 1793. O nce again,
w e are rem inded that explaining peasant insurrection requires explaining a
different m ix o f actions at different m om ents o f the Revolution. And explain
ing the trajectory o f peasant insurrections directed against one target
requires considering a curve with a different shape than actions directed
against another.
Rhythms
T he ebb and flow o f conflict is structured by the general rhythm s o f social
life. In rural France, the interweaving o f tim es o f w ork, o f play, and o f rest
could vary from year to year with the w eather. Yet there w as a clearly
visible cycle o f tasks that could be discerned through the variation in the
precise dates o f sow ing, harvesting, m arketing, and celebrating. The w eb
o f social institutions that sustained or that m ade dem ands upon rural
Nuabtr ol Events
Nuabtr ol Evtnts
Junb I Au4 3 Auq' 31
Incidence of Insurrection:June-Aug 1790

Fig. 6.6 (a) Peak Periods of Insurrection
15 -
Nu«b«r of Events
JM 1 ' J a n '17 Jan '24 J e n '31 Fob' 28
Incidence of InsurrectioniJan-Feb 1790
to
Nuaber of Evtoti
Junk 1 June ?3Junek26Juno 50
Incidence of Insurrection:June 1791

Fig. 6.6 (b) Peak Periods o f Insurrection
25 -
Nuaber of Event«
Incidence of Insurection:Feb-April 1792
20
Nuabor of Event«
No7“ i Nov' 21 iföv'ao
Incidence of InsurrectioniNovember 1792

Fig. 6.6 (c) Peak Periods of Insurrection
Rhythms op Contention 305
13
NuaOtr of Event»
Au4 1 Sept '2 Sept1 9 Sefct 16 Aug
Incidence of Insurrection:Aug-Sept 1792

Nuabtr of Event»
Fig. 6.6 (d) Peak Periods o f Insurrection

3 06 THE ABOLITION OF FEUDALISM
com m unities operated on their ow n rhythm s, too, the w hole constituting, in

its tem poral dim ension, a contrapuntal structure o f tensions, constraints,
and opportunities. Seigneurial paym ents in kind, the tithe, and to som e
extent the direct taxes had annual high points linked to harvest tim e: food
scarcities, and hence prices, rose in the spring and sum m er, then fell w ith
the availability o f harvested crops; the cycle o f festivals, generally with a
m arked religious com ponent, was itself linked to the rhythm s o f agricultural
w ork, and it provided opportunities for conviviality, drink, and m obilization
for con flict (and thus the liturgical year helped fram e the calendar o f riot and
rebellion); spring planting and sum m er reaping w ere occasion s for a social
truce. O f cou rse, one year was not identical to the next: open conflict could
be triggered by a particular change in the burden o f taxation or the m odalities
o f tax collection ; by a particular action taken by a particular lord; by the
specific m isfortunes o f this year’s w eather; by a reassignm ent o f visible
arm ed force altering the calculus o f risk; by unusual signs o f division am ong
elites. But the particularities o f specific m om ents o f hardship or opportunity
occured against a background o f calendrical regularities in conflict-prom oting
circum stances. T here is a structure in these affairs but fortuna also plays a
considerable p art
To explore the rhythm s o f rural conflict in the revolutionary period, I shall
first attem pt to establish as a baseline the general patterns o f rise and fall o f
open conflict through the annual cycle o f m onths and the w eekly cycle o f
days. Against a sense o f this background pattern, w e may attem pt to gauge
som e o f the specific features o f the conflicts o f the revolutionary years. T o
what degree w ere the tem poral rhythm s o f rural insurrection during the
Revolution a playing-out o f long-standing patterns and to what degree did
the shock o f revolutionary events or the creativity o f revolutionary partici
pants in the countryside break with the usual seasonal and daily rhythm s?
Microrhythms: The Weekly Cycle

Thanks to the herculean researches o f a team directed by Jean N icolas and
Guy Lem archand (see Chapter 5, p. 264) there is a great deal o f invaluable
inform ation available on the patterns o f rural contestation for w ell over a
century preceding the Revolution. The published data to date include an
inventory o f the tim ing o f disturbances involving youth groups, about 13%
o f the total incidents they are examining. T h ese events include clashes o f
the young people o f rival villages, confrontations arising from the role o f
en forcer o f communal m orality often assum ed by organized youth groups,
conflicts involving students or journeym en, and clashes with m ilitary recruit
ers. If w e are willing to let youthful battles d o duty for rural clashes as a
w hole,33 w e find in Figure 6 .7 a d ear depiction o f the w eekly cycle that

plainly existed betw een 1661 and the outbreak o f the Revolution. T he height
o f each bar represents the proportion o f conflicts that took place on a given
day. The horizontal line show s what those heights would be if the sam e
num ber o f events fell on every day o f the w eek.34 Sunday plainly predom i
nates: it may have been the day o f rest and prayer but it was also the day o f
riot and rebellion in the traditional French countryside. During the five
decades before the Revolution, m ore than tw ice as many even ts took place
(Hi Sunday as on M onday, the next m ost frequent day.
B Events:1661-1740 0 Events: 1741-1789

•4 n
(Souncelemarchand-Nicolas Data)
Fig. 6.7 Insurrectionary Events (1661-1789) by Day o f Week
33. The results for the full data set are not yet available but I have been able to use their data on
disturbances involving youth to trace weekly and annual rhythms. Since many significant forms of
rural conflict do not involve youth as such, it is conceivable that their full data set might show some
deviations from this picture. See jean Nicolas, “Une jeunesse montée sur le phis grand ton
d’insolence," in Robert Chagny, ed., Aux origines provinciales de la Révolution (Grenoble: Presses
Universitaires de Grenoble, 1990), 147.
34. Subsequent graphs in this chapter differ in whether the temporal units are days or months
(and if months, how many are included). They also differ in scale, so a reader needs to look carefully
at the indications on the left side. But the horizontal lines always represent the height that the bars
would have if all temporal units had equal numbers of events.
Few occasion s rival the regular Sunday M ass for bringing togeth er an
eighteenth-century rural com m unity. The w eekly M ass was one o f the few
elem ents o f a Christian identity that w ere observed with anything approach
ing unanimity35 and had becom e the m ost com m on event by which the very
existen ce o f a com m unity was m ade visible. A fter M ass, communal issu es
could be discussed, grievances aired, anger focu sed, plans hatched, and
actions taken. From hearing the w ord o f G od in the m orning to the often
riotous expression o f the voice o f the people in the afternoon or evening
w as a short step.
If w e return to Figure 6 .7 , w e see that the preem inence o f Sunday
clashes w as, if anything, even m ore m arked in the five decades preceding
the Revolution than in the eight decades before th at If w e think o f the
Church’s evolving position on celebrations w e can see why this would be the
case. Sundays w ere the preferred tim es for the festivals that punctuated
the liturgical year; it is unlikely that the connection o f Sunday and celebration
w as at all w eakened during the eighteenth century. A s a w ell-trained
priesthood, increasingly inclined to disapprove o f what it took to be pagan
ism , was supported by m odernizers disdainful o f traditions inim ical to
econom ic advance, the taming o f popular festivals becam e a standard
w eapon in the Catholic clergy’s battle with popular religion.36 One tactic in
this battle w as to elim inate festivals that fell on days other than Sunday
(thereby elim inating an alternate day on which contestation w as lik ely);37
another tactic was to relocate festivals to Sundays (thereby elim inating a
day o f leisu re).38 For that rather large (and perhaps increasing) num ber o f
35. Roger Chartier, The Cultural Origins of the French Revolution (Durham: Duke University
Press, 1991), 93-96. Sometimes, even that unanimity was not to be found and peasants were
noticed playing, drinking, or even working on Sundays. For an example, see Alain Molinier, Une
paroisse du bas Languedoc. Strignan, 1650-1792 (Montpellier Imprimerie Dehan, 1968), 130-35.
Jean Quéniart stresses how far short of full participation was the weekly mass in Les hommes,
féglise et Dieu dans la France duXVIlIe siicle (Paris: Hachette, 1978).
36. Yves-Marie Bercé, Fite et révolte: Des mentalités populaires du XVIe au XVIIIe siicle (Paris:
Hachette, 1976), 127-87; Jean Dehimeau, Catholicism between Luther and Voltaire: A New View of
the Counter-Reformation (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1977).
37. Yves-Marie Bercé begins his monograph on the festival-revolt connection with the observa
tion that any local official knew that festivals could be dangerous (Bercé, Fite et révolte, 13). The
Third Estate of Château-Thierry urges a reduction in the number of festivals since "each of them
involves the activation of a large number of people, carrying considerable danger to the State." The
elimination of festivals will insure "the sanctification of Sunday” iAP 2:674).
38. For some examples from Provence, see Michel \bvelle, Les métamorphoses de la fite en
Provence de 1750 à 1820 (Paris: Aubier/Flammarion, 1976), 82. The bishop of Tarbes seems to
have enjoyed complete success in ordering festivals shifted to Sundays in 1782. Although we lack a
full and precise chronology of such events, one of the leading scholars of the Counter-Reformation
French church reports that such was the general tendency since the mid-seventeenth century. See
Dominique Juba, “La Réforme post-tridentine en France d’après les procès verbaux des visites
pastorales: Ordre et résistances” in La Società religiosa neWetà moderna (Naples: Guido Editori,
1973), 385.
special Sundays30 another elem ent o f ferm ent was now added.3 40 N ot that
9
the reform ers w ished to increase Sunday’s riotous elem en t A s they strove
to curtail the num ber o f festivals and to tam e them by relocating them to
the day erf r e s t they also tried to dean up Sunday itself. W hile the reform ers
did make a start on purging Sunday o f elem ents that contam inated the
Lord’s day, it proved easier to alter the festival calendar than to rem ove
Sunday’s m ore profane aspects. Dom inique Juba speaks o f an obsessive
concern am ong the agents o f d erical reform with the Sunday cabaret, for
exam ple, as w ell as with the use o f the church building for such profane
purposes as hiding one’s m oney from state agents. Juba contrasts the
derical reform ers’ conception o f “the consecrated place that holds in its
tabernacle the B ody o f Christ” with the view o f the faithful for whom “ the
church rem ains the com m on house w here they com e to find each other
again” 41 The reform m ovem ent, then, may have m oved festivals but did not
tam e Sunday, as the N icolas-Lem archand data show .
W hy w as M onday the second m ost tum ultuous day? This seem s due to
the confluence o f several causes: M onday actions may som etim es have been
a consequence o f som e action initiated the day before continuing into the
next day (the targets o f action m ight fight back, for exam ple), som etim es a
consequence o f a plan o f action requiring a bit m ore organization and
structure than could be m ustered on the spot and som etim es, (H ie may
suggest, a consequence o f errors in the sources (a late-night action on
Sunday com ing to the attention o f the authorities the next m orning.)
Similarly, D iesday through Thursday was a m ore tum ultuous stretch than
Friday and Saturday, again suggesting a continuing falkrff as one m oves away
from Sunday.
T here was also, it would seem , a negative counterside to the church-
based communal organization o f rural con flict T here was a relative paucity
o f other organizational vehicles for con flict L et us not exaggerate: som e
pre-revolutionary conflict was not organized at M ass. In many villages
unmarried young m en constituted a strike force that routinely m ade life
m iserable for those w ho violated village norm s. W hile sanctions w ere
generally various form s o f public humiliation and fines (a pot-and-pan sere
nade beneath an offender’s window, for exam ple, that continued until a fine
39. The association of festival and Sunday was so great that in Provence wefl into 1794,
revolutionary festivals were celebrated to a disproportionate degree on Sundays. (See \foveDe,
Métamorphoses de laßte, 164-65.)
40. The events of a traditional Provençal Sunday or other festival moved from the saaaMty of
the morning Mass through sports, dancing, and a communal meal in the afternoon—and aOtoo
often, in the view of clerical spoilsports, on into drinks and pitched battles with the next village in
the evening (Vovelle, Métamorphoses de lafête, 62-63.) And were there, perhaps, sometimes other
battles to be fought7
41. Julia, “La Réforme poet-tridentine en France,” 352.
w as paid) and the targets generally such unfortunates as the w idow w ho

violated sexual norm s, there was a structure in (dace that m ight be activated
against other targets. O ther rural com m unities, especially in the South, had
their religious confraternities, often very active.42 And there w ere the
shadow y organized structures o f w age laborers o f which w e know all too
little (se e Chapter 5, p. 250). But if even the relatively w ell organized youth
groups43 fourni Sunday the day o f ch oice, the overall paucity o f other
m obilizational structures stands o u t44 O ne consequence, perhaps, w as a
great difficulty in undertaking unusual or nontraditional form s o f action that
m ight require som e planning, coordination, or travel-tim e. A ctions that
follow ed familiar form s, that could th erefore be put together on the spot,
executed at on ce, and staged at locations within easy reach w ere the
dominant on es.
W ith the traditional pattern in mind, w e turn to the rural revolution.
Figure 6 .8 contrasts the w eekly cycle in the revolutionary years w ith the
pattern for the previous half-century (itself, w e have seen, only slightly
changed from that o f the previous eight decades). The darker bars show the
events o f the revolutionary years, the lighter the previous half-century. A s
before, the horizontal line indicates what a perfectly even distribution o f
even ts would look like. W hile Sunday and M onday still have m ore events
than the rest o f the w eek, the differences are now slight. The Sunday share
has fallen by half and is actually a bit low er than M onday's. Considering rural
disturbances as a w hole, then, the French countryside was erupting along
lines that broke with the pattern o f the p a st If Sunday M ass had lost the
position it had occupied in past centuries as the organizational nucleus of
actions alm ost im m ediately carried out in the vicinity, there are several
conceivable p rocesses by which this change m ight have been effected . F irst
o f all, alternative organizational structures might have developed within the
politicized w orld o f the villages. T he m icropolitics o f rural France in revolu
tion is in many w ays still largely unknown to us, but it is clear that new
structures w ere being invented during the Revolution. From early on, R oger
42. Maurice Aguhon, Ptmtents etFrancs-maçons de ranciómeProvence (Paris: Fayard, 1968).

43. Natalie Zemon Davis, “The Reasons of Misrule,” in her Society and Culture mEarty Modem
France (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1975), 97-123; Nicole Castan, "Contentieux sociale
et utilisation variable du charivari à la fin de l’Ancien Régime en Languedoc” and E. P. Thompson,
" ‘Rough Music’ et Charivari. Quelques réflexions complémentaires," both inJacques Le Goff and
Jean-Claude Schmitt, eds., Le Charivari (Paris: Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales,
1981), 197-205 and 273-83.
44. One likely rival to the Mass as a mobilizational pole would be the market Since the market
brought together, on a single day, country people from several communities that did not necessarily
have easy access to each other, it may well have provided an important setting for organizing
multiparish actions as well as for recruiting peasants into events at more than a day’s wait
fromhome.
D u p u /s research has dem onstrated, there was a proliferation o f village-

level units o f the new ly created National Guard, units that often participated
in support o f peasant com m unities.45 Ultim ately, m ore than five thousand
rural com m unities form ed political chibs o f one sort or another.46 And the
levels o f rural participation in the num erous electoral p rocesses created by
the Revolution, while extrem ely variable, w ere often high, in som e (daces
and som e election s quite as high as in the tow ns47— and high electoral
turnouts usually suggest som e organizational hie.48 O f cou rse, w e don’t
want to push this further than the evidence will b ea r w e know little about
rural National Guard units outside o f Brittany; m ost com m unities never
form ed a political d u b ;49 and much o f rural France had consistently low
electoral participation.50 N onetheless, it is plausible that new organizational
45. Roger Dupuy, La Garde Nationale et les débuts de la Révolution en Ille-et-Vilaine (1789-mars
1793) (Rennes: Université de Haute Bretagne, 1972).
46. Jean Boutier and Philippe Boutry, "La diffusion des sociétés politiques en France (1789-an
DI). Une enquête nationale,” Annales Historiques de la Révolution Française, no. 266 (1986):
365-98. Serge Aberdam and Marie-Claude al Hamchari have indicated the significance of support
from the local “people’s societies” for the developing movement of sharecroppers around Autun in
1793-94. See “Revendications métayères: du droit à l’égalité audroit du bénéfice,” mLa Révolution
française et le monde rural (Paris: Editions du Comité des TVavaux Historiques et Scientifiques,
1989), 144-45.
47. Comparing voting in a half-dozen major cities with their surrounding rural areas, Malcolm
Crook shows a larger rural turnout early in the Revolution, but a significant rural faUoff thereafter.
See Crook, “ ‘Aux urnes, citoyens!’ Urban and Rural Electoral Behavior during the French
Revolution,” in Alan Forrest and Peter Jones, ReshapingFrance: 1bum. Country and Region during
the French Revolution (Manchester Manchester University Press, 1991), 152-67. See also Melvin
Edelstem, "L’apprentissage de la citoyenneté: participation électorale des campagnards et citadins
(1789-93),” in Michel Ibvelle, ed., L’image de la Révolutionfrançaise: Communications présentées
lors du Congris Mondial pour le Bicentenaire de la Révolution (Paris: Pergamon Press, 1989),
1:15-25 and "La place de h Révolution française dans la politisation des paysans,” in Annales
Historiques de la Révolution Française, no. 280 (1990): 135-49.
48. As early as the summer of 1790, Jacobin clubs were extremely active in mobilizing support
for desired candidates forlocal and national office as well as in the elections for priests and bishops
set up under the Civil Constitution of the Clergy. See Michael L Kennedy, TheJacobin Clubs m the
French Revolution: The First Years (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982), 174-77, 210-23.
(Although Kennedy’s examples are largely from fairly sizable urban centers, it is very likely that the
smaller dubs of smaller places were engaged in similar behavior.) For other indications of urban
involvement in rural mobilizations see Ado, Kresfianskoe dvizhenie, 270, 272-73, 289.
49. The founding of rural dubs, moreover, often was as late as 1792 or even 1793. See Christine
Peyrard, “Peut-on parler du jacobinisme dans l’Ouest? (Maine, bas Normandie)” in La Révolution
française et le monde rural (Paris: Editions du Comité des Travaux Historiques et Scientifiques,
1989), 371; Jean Boutier, “Un autre midi Note sur les sociétés populaires en Corse,” Armales
Historiques de la Révolution Française, no. 268 (1987): 169. On the other hand, in some places,
especially in the South, many dubs were formed early (Boutier and Boutry, “Diffusion des sociétés
politiques,” 397).
50. The comparison with 1848 is striking: in August-September 1792 fewer than 20% of adult
structures that could sustain m obilization developed in quite a num ber o f

rural com m unities.*51
A second likely source o f a displacem ent o f Sunday as the day o f
confrontation is the frequency o f tension-producing shocks w hose relation
ship to the w eekly cycle was essentially random . Even in the century before
the Revolution, tw o-thirds o f the events w ere not on Sundays: the arrival o f
recruiting officers, the passage o f grain-laden convoys in tim es o f dearth,
the dram atic w ords o f a local leader, the decision by a new lord to increase
exactions— all such shocks hardly waited for Sunday M ass. It seem s a
reasonable conjecture that the Revolution was a period unusually dense in
such shocks tirât altered the configuration o f opportunity, risk, and costs o f
inaction. The legislature in Paris continued to grind out com plex laws that
altered the term s o f the seigneurial rights and the tithe; local adm inistrators,
B All Events: 1708-1793 B Events: 1741-1789
(Source for 1741-1789:

Lemarchand-Nicolas data)
Fig. 6.8 Insurrectionary Events (1788-1793) by Day o f Week
menvoted; inApril 1848,84% did. See Peter McPhee, “Electoral Democracy andDirect Democracy
in France, 1789-1851,” European History Quarterly 16 (1986): 77-96.
51. For more on the development oí the forms of revolutionary rural organisation, see Chapter
7, pp. 419-22. For a very valuable overview of the many forms of organized activity, see Isaer
Woloch, The New Regime: Transformations of the French Civic Order, 1789-1820$ (New York:
Norton, 1994).
w ho changed with the frequent elections and the rapid shifts o f revolutionary
politics, w ere both struggling to m aster the new and changing laws and
learning how to apply (or ignore) them on the job , one day at a tim e; the
regulation o f the grain supply as it existed in the Old Regim e broke dow n;
the capacity o f central and local adm inistrators to en force tax-collection by
force ebbed and flow ed day by day; the judicial system , sim ilarly, w as
subject to continual reorganization. On the assum ption that such events
w ere random ly distributed across the w eek, a weakening o f Sunday dom i
nance would be expected.
Third, and finally, let us consider com m unities for which Sunday rem ained
the cen ter o f organizational life. To the extent that new form s o f struggle
w ere developed that would require som e planning and som e instruction in
those plans for those not at the planning session, it m ight now take m ore
than a few afternoon hours to launch an ev en t To the extent that som e
com m unities acquired a sen se o f effective participation in a national political
struggle, (m e m ight w ell exp ect the concom itant developm ent o f less
im pulsive and longer-term orientation to conflict that also may have shifted
events, even if first broached as usual on Sunday, to a later, m ore propitious
m om ent. The Revolution’s crash program in enlarging the field o f participa
tion, m oreover, m ight have m eant an enlargem ent in the geographic scop e
o f concern. T he actions contem plated on Sunday afternoon w ere m ore likely
than before planned to take place at locales m ore than a few hours’ walking
distance. C onsider for exam ple the extensive terrain covered by enorm ous
bands o f price-controllers w ho invaded one m arket after another in N ovem
ber and D ecem ber 1792 betw een the Seine and the L oire.52 T he need for
greater preparation for new er form s o f struggle, o f greater care in selecting
auspicious m om ents to strike in view o f the sen se o f protracted struggle
and the increased propensity to m arch to a m ore distant location— if these
p rocesses hypothetically suggested here actually took place— could certainly
explain a part o f the shift away from Sunday and m ight w ell explain, indeed,
M onday’s new prom inence. W hile much o f this m ust rem ain, for now ,
uncom fortably speculative, there is som e evidence on the creation o f new
form s o f contention, to which w e shall return shortly.
W ith the evidence at hand, w e can go rather further than our com parison
o f all even ts betw een June 1788 and June 1793 with the traditional w eekly
cycle o f rural con flict We can look at the distribution across the w eek o f our
separate form s o f con flict Figures 6 .9 (a H d ) p resen t side by side, the
average daily patterns for our eight conflict form s. We see that different
peasant actions differ in their propensity to focu s on Sunday. Counterrevolu
tionary even ts are as fully concentrated (Hi Sundays as in the prerevolution
52. Michel \bvele, Ville d campagne au XVIIIe siècle. Chartres d la Btauce (Paris: Editions
Sociales. 1980), 230.
ary pattem , which I take as a sign o f their rootedn ess in traditional

structures. W age con flicts, on the contrary, rarely com m ence on Sundays
(and never on M ondays, for that m atter). Antiseigneurial even ts are, in
these term s, o f an interm ediate variety: rather m ore concentrated on
Sundays than the horizontal baseline, but w ell below the traditional pattem .
I suggest a hypothesis to account for these differences. C onflicts pitting
an entire com m unity against a com m on enem y could be planned on a Sunday
that brought the com m unity together. Thus many land seizures, pitting the
collectivity against the lord, could be planned after M ass; but w age disputes,
pitting laborers against proprietors, w ere divisive and could hardly be
planned in a gathering o f the w hole (and so m uch the w orse if som e o f the
laborers w ere seasonal m igrants). Thus no w ork stoppages on M onday
either. Subsistence disturbances pitted consum ers against produ cers.53
Thus other organizational structures, w hatever they w ere, had to be
created. That the antiseigneurial events occupy the interm ediate position
they do suggests that to a large extent they w ere still sustained by traditional
com munal structures, but w ere also com ing to make use o f new er structures
that em erged in the Revolution (village units o f the National Guard, village
political clubs), thereby becom ing less Sunday-oriented. To be sure, each o f
the form s o f conflict that lacks a Sunday focu s has its ow n special explana
tion. O f the Revolution’s w age conflicts one observes that, at least in
principle, labor w as not taking place on the Lord’s day anyway, thereby
rendering inoperative the dram atic refusal to w ork. On the other hand,
alternate actions w ere still conceivable, such as announcing that w ork w ould
not be perform ed, threatening the em ployer, or seizing the fruits o f labor.
H ence a few w age conflicts w ere initiated on this day.
M any subsistence even ts clustered around m arket days, which could be
any other day,54 and therefore generate the appearance o f essentially
random groupings o f events by day. But on the other hand, m arketplace
even ts are no m ore than 29% o f all subsistence events (see Table 5 .6 ). A s
for the provocative actions that could easily trigger subsistence even ts (a
nearby tow n’s seizure o f grain, a state agent making a purchase or a
provocative attem pt to transport grain from place to place), these no doubt
operated according to an adm inistrative calculus unrelated to the sacred
cycle o f days, again producing an effectively random clustering o f sparks
53. Cynthia Bouton shows that participants tended to be dependent on the market for their food
but victims were those with marketable surpluses. See "Les victimes de h violence populaire
pendant la guerre des farines (1775),” in Jean Nicolas, ed., Mouvements populaires et conscience
sociale, XVJe-XIXe siècles (Paris: Makrine, 1985), 395; "Gendered Behavior in Subsistence Riots:
The Flour War of 1775,"Journal ofSocialHistory 23 (1990): 743.
54. The Almanack Royal for 1789 has a long list of places with weekly markets, as wefl as the
less frequent fairs. The former are well represented on every day of the week except Sunday. See
Almanack Royal, Annie Commune 1789 (Paris: Debure, 1789), 641-42.
B AntiMifftturialiM.1788-1793 0 Ev«nta:l741>1789
•4 n
Antiseigneurial Events Dy Oay

B Antitax Event*.1788-1793 0 Events: 1741-1789
.4 n
Antitax Events by Oay

(Source for 174l-l789:Lemarchand-Nicolas Data)
Fig. 6.9 (a) Tÿpes o f Insurrectionary Events by Day o f Week
316 TH E ABOLITION OF FEUDALISM
BRtllQtOut Events.1788-!793 0 Events: 1741-1789

.4 T
Religious Events Dy Oay

B Subsistence Events. 1788-1793 0 Events: 1741-1789
.4
non Tue» Beo Thurs Fri Set ï

Subsistence Events by Oay
(Source for l74l-l789:Lemarchand-Nicolas Oata)
Fig. 6.9 (b) Types o f Insurrectionary Events by Day o f Week
■ Land Conflicts. 1788-1793 0 Events: 1741-1789

.4 T
lu is Rio Thurs Fri

Land Conflicts by Day
0 Countsrr*volution.1788-17g3 0 Events: 1741-1789
.4 T
Counterrevolutionary Events by Day

(Source for 1741-1789:Lemarchand-Nicolas Data)
Fig. 6.9 (c) TVpes o f Insurrectionary Events by Day o f Week
B Nagt Conflicts.1788-1793 0 Evsnts:l741-1789
wage Conflicts Dy Oay

0 Panics.1788-1793 0 Events: 1741-1789
.4 n
Panics by Oay
(Source for 174l-1789:Lemarchand-Nicolas Data)
Fig. 6.9 (d) Types o f Insurrectionary Events by Day o f Week
that m ight strike the social dynam ite created by scarcities— but such sparks
could fall on Sundays as welL
W hat w age and subsistence conflicts have in com m on is their often
divisive character, divisive in term s o f French peasant com m unities. W age
con flicts took place within com m unities that included rural em ployers as
m em bers (and perhaps the m ost respected and influential m em bers). Subsis
ten ce even ts are centrally the w ork o f the village have-nots,55 dependent on
purchases in the m arket, seeking non-church-oriented bases for m obiliza
tion. It w ould seem likely that those w ho undertook to organize such events
w ould do so away from the religious context, which favored a solidary sense
o f com m unity.56 We all know the nineteenth-century cliché o f village politics:
the socialist grouping o f the rural p oor and the schoolteacher against the
village elite and the p riest D o w e have here ju st a h in t perhaps, that the
organizational base for m obilization o f the rural proletariat in conflict against
their local em ployers w as, at least as early as the Revolution, already
m oving away from the church as the cen ter o f solidarity and organization?
Panics also seem to have avoided Sundays. Panics, like subsistence
events w ere, no d ou bt often triggered by events w hose real or im agined
occurance bore little relation to the rhythm s o f the w eek. Yet this would
only explain the fact that Sunday w as not especially characterized by such
occu rren ces. The data show , how ever, an outright avoidance o f Sunday; in
fa c t there is a M onday high that falls alm ost steadily through Sunday. I have
no very com pelling explanation to offer, excep t the possibility that the
religious and secular structure o f the day offered a certain m easure o f
tem porary immunity. The religious elem ent may, perhaps, have generated
a certain calm in the face o f unknown danger, w hether uncertain food
shortages, seigneurial outrages, or ecclesiastical exactions. If religion w as,
to any extent at all, the people’s opium , in a fam ous phrase, it w as an opium
only effective against anxious fantasy and, w e have ju st seen, dulled actions
against real targets not a w h it M oreover, the w ell-established Sunday
traditions o f m obilization may have channeled any anxious sensations into
relatively w ell established directions. A com m unity struck by scary tidings
o f threat m ay, on Sunday, have attacked the château or the tax-barrier,
w hereas, outside the structures that norm ally channeled their actions, they
fled before or m arched to m eet the English, Savoyards, or M oors.
Antiseigneurial events and land conflicts occurred m ore frequently on
Sundays than any other day, but Sunday's edge w as slight and w ell short o f
55. See Cynthia Bouton’s evidence on participants in the Flour War a decade and a half prior to
the Revolution in “Gendered Behavior in Subsistence Riots,” Journal ofSocial History 23 (1990):
743. Flour War participants were wage laborers or wage-workers in small-scale domestic indus
try—a profile that no doubt resembles the participants in wage conflicts.
56. Does the absence of Monday wage conflicts mean that they were not even planned
onSunday?
320 TH E ABOLITION O F FEUDALISM
its traditional leading position. D oes this pattern suggest, perhaps, that
traditional organizational form s w ere still serviceable for conflicts w ith lords
and over land, but that new er structures, nonetheless, w ere em erging?
This seem s very likely. It is d ear that rural National Guard units w ere often
at the heart o f antiseigneurial struggles. And Colin Lucas has som e scattered
evidence that, in the Southeast, political du bs tried to ally with the rural
p oor (but let us rem em ber that Jacobins w ere often unhappy about any
autonom ous popular m ovem ent).57
In light o f the foregoing, it will com e as no great surprise that our broad
class o f religiously tinged events rem ain highly concentrated on Sundays
(although not to the traditional d egree). The causal p rocesses probably ran
in both directions: the religious auspices o f the communal structures form ed
(xi Sundays probably tended to impart to such events a religious dim ension;
and those w hose im pulses to action carried a religious tinge w ere probably
particularly drawn to Sunday events both as an appropriate organizational
site and out o f the spiritual needs for the religious service. In this light, it is
interesting that even these events do not quite have the full Sunday salience
that prevailed from the m id-seventeenth century to the dawn o f revolution.
If anti-tax even ts, too, shared in a strong Sunday concentration (although
also rather short o f the traditional pattern) m ight it be because the long and
virtually continuous tradition o f Old Regim e tax rebellion had evolved
structures o f contestation that continued to prove adequate into the revolu
tionary era? (TVaditionally, w e may note, again drawing on the w ork o f the
N icolas-Lem archand group, that anti-tax events constituted as many as 22%
o f all even ts betw een 1661 and 1789).58 If so, is the increased salience o f
M onday a sign that anti-tax battlers w ere now seeking out the tax-collection
apparatus at m ore than a few hours’ distance from hom e? Such w ould seem
to be likely. To attack the collection apparatus o f the lords or the church,
for exam ple, one m ight bum the archives o f the local château or m onastery;
to attack the collection apparatus o f the state, one generally would have to
m arch to an urban adm inistrative cen ter (see Chapter 5, p. 237). M any tax
actions, planned near the village church on Sunday afternoon, m ay have led
to peasant groups arriving in tow n the next day.
B y com parison w ith the other m ajor conflict categories, the pattern for
counterrevolution stands o u t Unlike the other seven categories, it is
virtually identical to the Old Regim e pattem . To m erely note the religious
elem ent in counterrevolutionary protest is, how ever, by no m eans an
adequate explanation, unless expanded: w e have ju st seen that the “ reH-
57. Colin Lucas, "Résistances populaires à h Révolution dans le sud-est,” in Jean Nicolas, ed.,
Mouvementspopulaires et conscience sociale, XVle-XIXe siècles (Paris: Maloine, 1985), 474.
58. Jean Nicolas, "Les émotions dans l’ordinateur,” paper presented at Université Paris'VU,
1986,5.
gious” category o f conflict, while stressing Sundays, still foils m arkedly

short o f the traditional frequency. IW o com plem entary observations suggest
them selves. First o f all, a good deal o f counterrevolutionary activity origi
nated not in am orphous "religious” considerations but specifically around
country-dw ellers’ attem pts to p rotect their good priest against d ie urban
intruders. In parts o f France, large num bers o f priests had refused to take
the oath that the new regim e insisted on for its priests, ju st as it insisted on
oaths from other public functionaries (as priesthood w as con ceived as being
under the new religious legislation).5® T lie W est not only had an unusual
concentration o f these nonjuring priests, as the oath-refusers w ere known,
but they w ere for m ore likely to have been local boys than w as the case
elsew here in F rance.5 60 The revolutionary authorities, step by step, barred
9
these refractory clerics from saying M ass. Ultim ately, the authorities,
declaring them outlaws, sent out search parties to run them down and bring
them to ju stice (unless they w ent into exile, to be sure). M any country
people began to acquire the habits o f concealm ent, evasion, and clandestinity
that w ere to provide the skills, experience, and culture o f arm ed counterrev
olution. Hiding priests in their hom es, m oving them about a step ahead o f
the authorities, hearing clandestine M ass in the w oods, the nuclei o f
future arm ed rebel bands form ed them selves. W ith the M ass providing a
w onderful, if as yet peaceful, com bination o f filling a spiritual need, register
ing defiance o f the alien revolutionary state and enjoying the fellow ship in
risk o f co-w orshipers, it is easy to understand that when the W est exploded,
it may frequently have been the illegal but unrepressible M ass at which the
decision to strike at on ce was taken, leading to the many even ts o f Sunday,
M arch 13, and Sunday, M arch 20, 1793. But, m ore broadly, the data
suggest that traditional organizational practices w ere, appropriately enough,
em braced by those rising in defense o f tradition.61
William Sew ell has contended that the innovative character o f the transfor
m ation o f social struggles betw een the Old Regim e and the m id-nineteenth
century is best gauged by attending to the m ove away from “ communal”
bases o f m obilization tow ard "assodational” on es.62 The traditional form s o f
tax resistance, subsistence disturbance, and land invasion are seen by him
as profoundly com m unal.63 The evidence w e have review ed above suggests
59. Ikkett, Religion, Revolution andRegional Culture.

60. Ifcckett, “The West in France in 1789.”
61. The western context of counterrevolution suggests considering the heightened significance
of the Sunday gathering in this region of scattered farmsteads. Regional differences in the
insurrectionary salience of Sundaywill be explored in Chapter 7.
62. William H. Sewell Jr., “Collective Violence and Collective Loyalties in France: Why the
French Revolution Made a Difference,” fbttrics andSociety 18 (1990): 527-52.
63. Ibid., 537. I think Sewell underrates the extent to which the latter two were, even
traditionally, conflicts withinrural communities.
the possibility that the uncom m on w age conflicts and the quite com m on
subsistence conflicts had gerne rather far tow ard assodational form s o f
organization; that the antiseigneurial events and land conflicts w ere develop
ing new assodational bases but still drew on communal traditions; and that
counterrevolution w as the w ork o f com m unities.
Excursus on Innovation in Struggle

Our data suggest another w ay to get at the innovative character o f peasant
m obilization. If rising num bers o f events m ean m ore than sim ply a quantita
tive increase in the intensity o f con flict but also signal a search for new
form s o f action, w e would exp ect to see an increase in the num bers o f
m ultiaction events. The breakdown o f the Old Regim e, on this hypothesis,
did m ore than present prom ising targets to those who would m obilize; it did
m ore than decrease the costs o f such m obilization as the repressive
apparatus disintegrated (and as other rural com m unities revolted, multiply
ing the possible targets for repressive efforts, which w ere thereby diluted).
The breakdown also encouraged rural com m unities to invent new form s o f
political action. On such a hypothesis, again, one would exp ect to see the
opening o f the rural struggle to show also an expansion in the num bers o f
actions undertaken per incident: rural com m unities experim ent w ith new
com binations o f tactics and targets. In a com parative vein, let us note
that those scholars o f other “ cycles o f p rotest," to use Sidney Tarrow ’s
expression ,64 w hose data perm itted them to undertake such an exploration
report such results. In Tarrow 's ow n im pressive research into patterns o f
conflict in Italy in the 1960s and early 1970s, he finds that as the w ave o f
con flict m ounts in the streets, so d oes the com plexity o f the form s o f that
co n flict65 Tarrow also finds a secon d elem ent o f patterning in his data: the
early rise in com plexity is follow ed by a sim plification. The likely explanation
for the secon d elem ent o f the story suggests a successful search: the
participants in con flict in the cou rse o f their initial innovative and experim en
tal approach to struggle, com e to discover which sorts o f actions yield
desired results against which sorts o f targets and increasingly m obilize for
m ore single-m inded form s o f action.
64. See, for example, Sidney T m to w , “Political Opportunities, Cycles of Protest and Colectiva
Action: Theoretical Perspectives,” presented to Workshop on Collective Action Events, Cornel
University, October 1990.
65. Sidney Tarrow, Democracy and Disorder: Protest and Mities m Italy, 1965-1975 (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1989). Charles Tilly's data on public contention in Britainfrom the mid-eighteenth
century through 1834 has the richest density of detail on each incident that any researcher has yet
achieved for such a long time period. For the period of popular mobilization that accompanied the
Reform Bill of 1832, computations based on Tilly’s data also show an initial rise in the number of
actions per event and a subsequent decline; see Charles TiHy, PopularContention m GnatBritain,
1758-1834 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995), p. 88.
Figure 6 .1 0 show s the trend in the com plexity o f rural insurrectionary

events. (W e use three-m onth m oving averages to sm ooth out an extrem ely
spiky data series.) W e find, very roughly, the rise-and-fall pattem , suggest
ing an early, if uneven, trend tow ard trying out m ore and m ore actions in
the cou rse o f particular clashes and a later, if equally uneven, sloughing o ff
o f actions. If there is a sort o f dialectic o f innovation and routinization in the
structure o f con flict, the data suggest that innovation is far m ore likely to
take the form o f novel com binations o f familiar elem ents than it is the
invention o f som ething wholly new . The 274 actions distinguished in the
cod e that I utilized are m odes o f conflict that, for the m ost part, are not in
them selves new .
Could one then reasonably conclude that w ere one to attem pt to situate
the rural upheaval within the great debate on the degree to which the
Revolution is properly characterized by the participants’ ow n sen se o f
rupture or the m ore ironic sense o f continuity with the past that observers
since Tocqueville have displayed, one would have to stress continuity in the
form s o f struggle, even if, arguably, the intensity and the consequences o f
that struggle have little precedent? Such a form ulation is a bit too quick. In
the first place, it ignores the degree to which innovation in many other
(Three Month Moving Averages)

con texts is often a rearrangem ent o f the fam iliar.66 And secon d, it ign ores
the new elem ents that w ere brought into the repertoire o f revolutionary
self-expression by these very country people (although, to be sure, th ese
elem ents w ere brought from som ew here). M ost fam ous am ong such innova
tions was the tree o f liberty, a village m aypole, w hose implantation in a
seigneurial lawn invested it with a m eaning that expanded its traditional
seasonal evocation o f the awakening energies o f springtim e.67 From its
earliest reported defiant casting aside o f the seigneurial w inter in P érigord
and Q uercy in 179068 it becam e a standard part o f the repertoire o f rural
action (and, for that m atter, o f festivals organized by urban elites; se e
Chapter 7, p. 418).
Annual Rhythms
B etw een the m acrorhythm s o f peaks and troughs that structured rural
disturbance from 1788 to 1793 and the m icrorhythm s o f the w eekly cy cle,
there was an interm ediary pattern, an annual periodicity (a m esorhythm ?) in
which the recurring events o f the m eteorological and liturgical years w ere
significant con texts for contestation as they w ere for w ork, prayer, and
leisure. Unlike the w eekly m icrorhythm s, the annual m esorhythm s had
undergone som e significant m utations in the thirteen decades before the
Revolution. Figure 6.11 show s that from the m id-eighteenth century on,
sum m er was the highpoint o f conflict m obilization, with a m idsum m er
slackening in July, perhaps by w ay o f a social truce for that season 's
extensive field labors.69 (T o aid in interpretation, I have on ce again drawn a
line to indicate the value that all m onths would have if there w ere no m onth-
to-m onth variation.) D isturbances fall o ff considerably by O ctober and
precipitously so by N ovem ber, with an im portant D ecem ber flareup. (T h e
D ecem ber flareup— relative to N ovem ber and January— N icolas suggests,
may be due to the holiday season’s provision o f favorable opportunities by
w ay o f num erous social gatherings at which one may plan and organize som e
action .) The early new year is the off-season for tumult as w ell as for
everything else, but in February the rate o f disturbance tends to rise again.
The N icolas data show this pattern to have supplanted a still older one in
66. See the important observations of Arthur Stmchcombe on the blurry boundary between
innovation and routine administration in the management of factories (Creating Efficient Industrial
Organizations [New York: Academic Press, 1974]).
67. The Constitutional Bishop Grégoire begins his essay on trees of tiberty by pointing to the
antiquity of “emblems of living nature, dying and being reborn.” He then interprets the maypole as
a spring rituaL See “Essai historique et patriotique sur les arbres de la liberté," in Henri Grégoire,
L’Abbt Grégoire, Evêque des Lumièm (Paris: Editions France-Empire, 1988), 192, 198.
68. Ozouf, Lafite révolutionnaire 1789-1799 (Paris: Gallimard, 1976), 281.
69. Nicolas, “Unejeunesse,” 147.
B Events: 1661-1740 0 Events: 1741-1769

.15 i
Feb Apr Jun Aug Oct Oec
(Source:Lemarchand-Nicolas Data)
Fig. 6.11 Insurrectionary Events by Month
which February through April w as the tim e o f tensions. Both patterns

suggest a certain observance o f a social truce to p rotect the crops on which
all depend. But it is a weak truce: the late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-
century country people may have been avoiding destroying harvested crops
by scaling back social struggles in August and Septem ber, but they extended
the hotpoint o f struggle from February into planting-tim e. And if planting
tim e is not an unusually confhctual m om ent after 1741, neither is it a low
p oin t And, although the later eighteenth-century country people avoided
destruction o f harvested crops in the fall, conflict is still m arked as late as
Septem ber. One w onders, indeed, if the extent o f conflict in August and
Septem ber in the half-century before the Revolution may be taken precisely
as an indicator o f a breakdown o f an older tradition o f truce. One continuity
throughout the era: conflict took a break in July and January was the low est
point in the year.
T h ose in pow er, in revolution as in earlier tim es, might w ell take such
m onthly rhythm s into account. W ith his mind on the possibility that conflicts
over food m ight serve the grow ing conservative challenge developing around
recalcitrant Catholics, Thom as Lindet, him self a clerical deputy from

E vreux, w rites his brother on M ay 8, 1790, that “ I w on't conceal that I’v e
always feared June and July.” Lindet goes (Hi to urge that the traditional
prayers be reinstituted preem ptively before a price rise forces an em bar
rassing revival in prayer to placate the faithful.70 We note the im perfections
o f perception; July was norm ally much calm er than June. But then, w e
reflect, Lindet has ju st lived through the m ost unusual July in his country's
history; after that sum m er one m ight w ell feel that one had always w orried
about July. (And perhaps U ndet’s anxieties w ere exacerbated by the
circum stance that the M ay in which he was w riting was an unusually high
point o f food con flict in 1790 with m ore than one-fourth o f all such even ts
that yea r.)
T h ere are many w ays one m ight explore the seasonality o f the insurrec
tionary countryside in the tim e o f revolution. One might exam ine a m onthly
graph in which all incidents for the half-dozen years covered are repre
sented; one m ight consider each type o f incident separately over the six-
year period; one might consider all incidents together for each o f the six
years individually; one m ight consider each type o f event and each year in
itself. T he conclusion that em erges from a study o f all these w ays o f
attacking the question, how ever, is a sim ple one: the people o f the country
side are very far indeed from the traditional seasonal rhythm s. Like the
w eekly rhythm that approxim ated the traditional for w ily som e form s o f
conflict, the rural insurrection in the years o f revolution only occasionally
resem bled the traditional pattern, alm ost regardless o f which type o f con flict
or which year w e are exam ining. I shall present ju st one group o f th ese
graphs to point this up. Figure 6.12 sets side by side, for each year from
1789 to 1792, the m onthly distributions o f all insurrectionary even ts; Figure
6.13 presents the sam e inform ation for 1788 and 1793, the tw o years for
which our data only covers half the m onths. In 1788, only one o f the tw o
traditionally conflictual sum m er m onths approxim ates its usual character;
and the autumnal falloff, which seem s w ell launched with the typical O ctober
drop, doesn’t take place but is replaced by a strong and steady rise after
that m onth. July totally dom inates 1789, o f cou rse, in striking violation o f
July’s usual status as a relatively quiet place betw een the hot spots o f June
and August. In 1790, the overw helm ing month for trouble is January,
norm ally the low point o f the year. B y contrast, 1791 d oes approxim ate the
typical Old Regim e pattem , com plete with a dip in July and a rise in
D ecem ber. We may note 1792 for its utter violation o f any traditional
tendency tow ard a springtim e truce for planting; and, on the other hand,
norm ally contentious June is the low point o f the year. A s for 1793, on e’s
70. Robert-Thomas Lindet, Correspondence de Thomas Lindet pendant la Constituante et ¡a

Législative (1789-1792) (Paris: Armand Montier, 1899), 158-59.
expectation o f a middling level o f conflict in M arch is thw arted by the surge

o f counterrevolution.
This last point may contain the germ o f an understanding o f the seasonally
deviant nature o f revolutionary peasant action. The Revolution w as a tim e in
which traditional form s o f struggle w ere m obilized, as has been frequently
stressed by historians and as our data reaffirm s.71 The Revolution was also
a period in which new organizational possibilities em erged that com ple
m ented, but surely did not supplant, these traditional routes to m obilization.
And the Revolution was a period o f ceaseless challenges and opportunities
that arose out o f the political com plexities o f a French state and a French
society in turm oil from the village to the legislature and from the P yrenees
to Flanders. The tim ing o f these challenges and opportunities in no way
obeyed the rhythm s o f the seasonal calendar o f conflict to which the
countryside was habituated. The w ork rhythm s that w ere superim posed on
the natural year, the rhythm s o f exaction by lord, church, and state
superim posed upon both o f these, the m onthly cycle o f prices sim ilarly
superim posed, and the liturgical calendar, again partly oriented to the cycle
o f sow ing, ripening, and harvesting— all these had bound the local com m u
nity in a com plex and contrapuntal yet highly regular rhythm o f con flict and
peace to m atch the m ore fundamental cycles o f w ork and r e s t
But the great even ts o f the Revolution w ere so many shocks that operated
outside the constraints o f this local w orld. The cyclical patterns o f con flict
rooted in the rhythm s o f local, everyday life, w ere overw helm ed by the
force o f national even ts. France’s villagers still acted locally, often in
traditional w ays, but the rhythm s o f contention w ere driven, not so much
by the cyclical rhythm s o f w ork and prayer and r e s t as by the unique shocks
o f unprecedented even ts felt throughout the country. If the sum m er o f 1788
w as su cceeded by a quickening o f the political crisis at the cen ter over the
structure o f the com ing E states-G eneral and a concom itant struggle around
the country over the local preparations for the convocation, it is unremark
able that the rhythm s of.n iral conflict joined in the ascending conflict o f the
national and provincial elites, rather than follow ing the traditional autumnal
cooling-dow n; if the great crisis o f the self-declared National A ssem bly
versus the king cam e to a head in July, that m onth’s typical status as a hiatus
betw een the storm s o f June and August was irrelevant; if the many, many
forces pushing for w ar both in Paris and in hostile capitals w ere tightening .
71. See Chapter 5; Coin Lucas, “The Crowd and Politics,” in Coin Lucas, ed., The French
Revolution and the Creation ofModem Mitical Culture, voL 2, The Metical Culture <4the French
Revolution (Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1988), 259-85. PeterJones would seem to be summarizing a
great deal of research in commenting on 1789 in the countryside: "The violence was directed
against traditional enemies and by traditional means for the most part, and it seemed patterned on
the jacquerie model of the seventeenth century”; see his The ftasantry m the French Revolution
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 60.
1709
■ Insurrectionary Events Q Basslins Evsnts:l741-1789

Fig. 6.12 (a) Monthly Proportions of Insurrections, 1789-1792
1790
■ Insurrectionary Events Bsseline Events:i741-1789
1792
■ Insurrectionary Events Baseline Events:174I-1789
Feb Apr Jun Auo Oct Dec

Monthly Proportions of Events
Fig. 6.12 (b) Monthly Proportions o f Insurrections, 1789-1792
■ Insurrectionary Events 0 Baseline Events:1741-1789

.25 i
Monthly Proportions of Events (1780)

■ Insurrectionary Events 0 Baseline Events:l741-1789
•6 n
.4
.2
0
Monthly Proportions of Events (1793)
Fig. 6.13 Monthly Proportions of Insurrections, 1788 and 1793
interstate tension to the point that France’s declaration o f w ar on Austria o f

April 20, 1792, seem s to be the playing-out o f an inexorable logic o f crisis,
is it far-fetched to suggest that locally difficult situations w ere being invested
with a trem endous freight, contributing in som e areas to an extrem e
explosion in M arch and April?72 If the w ar-forced rhythm o f conscription hit
the countryside in M arch 1793, why would a w estern countryside already
activated and organized by the m onths o f struggle over the Civil Constitution
o f the C lergy, already em bittered by conflict for church holdings with
urbanites, already disappointed in the irrelevance o f revolutionary change to
the particular concern s o f local peasants, w hy would such a countryside
await the usually m ore explosive sum m er m onths? Even in the least deviant
year o f 1791, distant events may have affected local actions. T he king’s
attem pted flight and subsequent humiliating capture in late June 1791 is an
obvious exogenous sou rce o f tension that may have contributed to the
som ew hat higher num ber o f disturbances than w ere usual for June and July.
What these reflections on the m onthly statistics add up to is a strong
indication that national politics w ere sending shock w aves through rural
France. A ctions o f legislature or king triggered actions in the villages. T he
targets o f peasant actions may have been very much local ones but the
causes o f peasant actions, at least as reflected in the unusual m onthly
pattern o f insurrection, included the decisions on national policies o f revolu
tionary elites. We shall pursue below the mutual influence o f legislature and
village (see Chapter 8 ).
Further Observations
T he w eekly and annual rhythm s enhance our understanding o f the startling
im pact o f rural insurrection. July 27, 1789, was not m erely startling in the
72. The départementtAGard andportion» of its neighbors constituted a large powderheg awaiting
a spark. The Revolution provided an opportunity for Protestant and Catholic mobilization and
countermobüization. The region was also anearly site of attempts at organizing armed counterrevo
lutionary resistance and was thereby prey to armed preemptive measures undertaken by pro
revolutionary forces, particularly National Guard detachments organized in Marseille. Like other
areas near Avignon, moreover, Gard was drawn on for armed forces to participate in the assertion
of French sovereignty in that papal territory, in what was to be a forerunner (and one of the minor
causes) of the generalized interstate conflict which both France and the major Continental powers
seemed by March 1792 to be bent on initiating. In such a donate the capsizing of an overloaded
boatload of local troops on the Rhône became the occasion for a very large number of attacks on
local châteaux. See Henri Mazel, "La Révolution dans le Midi: L’incendie des châteaux du bas
Languedoc,” Revue de la Révolution 8 (1886): 142-57, 307-19, 380-91, 456-69, and François
Rouvière, Histoire de la Révolution française dans le département du Gard (Marseille: Lafitte
Reprints, 1974), voL 2.
num ber o f insurrectionary events nor in their geographic dispersion. It was

also a break with the patterns o f rural insurrection that pointed to a
new , unknown, and frightening future. Assum ptions based on m ore than a
century’s experience o f rural disturbance w ere violated in the ch oice o f
targets, the m onth they occurred, and the days o f action. T he fifth o f the
day’s events (or the third o f July’s as a w hole) with an antiseigneurial
character pointed to a grow ing trend in peasant action to escape from the
patterns enshrined in tradition. The m ovem ent not only failed to slack o ff in
July, but accelerated. And far too many incidents got launched outside o f the
usual Sunday fram ew ork. Is it going too far to suggest that part o f what
m ade the G reat Fear so uncanny to observers was that it so flam boyantly
m anifested itself in the w rong m onth and cm the w rong days? Thus the rural
m ovem ents o f 1789 played a part in fixing the sense o f a rupture with
the p a st
Both the persistence o f the habitual rural cycles o f conflict and the
divergences from those habitual patterns tell us som ething o f the nature o f
the revolutionary upheavals in the countryside and the articulation o f village
conflicts and national politics. But w e have opened up, in this chapter, many
m ore questions than w e have answ ered. W hy was one peak tim e o f conflict
prim arily antiseigneurial, another focu sed on subsistence issues and a third
structured around land? W hy did antiseigneurial conflicts have a strong
adm ixture o f religiously tinged incidents at som e points, but not at others?
And, above all, w hy did battles over the seigneurial regim e com e to occupy
the place they did am ong the many sou rces o f contention in rural France?
To deal with issues o f tem poral patterning, w e will have to locate these
conflicts in their social settings, which m eans, to a considerable exten t,
locating them m ore precisely in space (see Chapter 7).
We also see som ething o f the m ix o f tradition and innovation in patterns
o f rural disturbance. T here is o f late an interesting bit o f debate around this
them e. Charles T illy, attuned to the form s o f contention, sees the Revolution
as an incubator o f new m odes o f contestation that w ithered soon after. For
T illy, the point at which there w as a perm anent sloughing-off o f old form s
and taking on o f new is m id-nineteenth century. In the history o f collective
protest, Tilly provocatively urges, the Revolution o f 1848 is m uch m ore o f a
turning point than the great Revolution o f 1789.73 William Sew ell has
responded with the argum ent that Tilly understates the significance o f the
em ergence o f assodational form s o f struggle, given currency by the pow er
ful new m odel o f the state itself as an association. A deliberately enacted
w ritten constitution that creates a structure, was a pow erful m odel upon
73. Charles Tilly, The Contentious French (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University
Press, 1986), 388-89.
which other, political associations m ight build.74 M ax W eber had contended

that one o f the m ajor distinguishing characteristics o f m odem form s o f
authority (“ rational-legal,” in his term inology) is the claim that they are
governed by rules that have been “ intentionally established” 75 as opposed to
rules that have been always there by virtue o f being the eternal rules laid
down by G od or the unchanging order o f the universe. Such “ traditional”
rules need to be found. Sew ell is arguing that the revolutionary legislatures,
in creating constitutions and laws, provided a culturally resonant m odel o f
rule-m aking and thereby legitim ated the creation o f new organizations for
particular goals ( = “ associations” ) rather than diffuse organizations that
seem part o f the tim eless fabric o f existen ce (like the village).
Our data advance the discussion a bit, but w ily a bit. First o f all, w e saw
in Chapter 5 that m ost form s o f insurrectionary expression w ere variations
on w ell-w orn patterns. On the other hand, the m ix o f form s w as new .
M oreover, som e o f the actions w ere them selves new , at least on anything
like this scale in France. (Thus the m aypoles, while familiar enough to
Am ericans, w ere initially quite m ysterious to French elites when they
appeared in the rural S ou th w est) M ore strikingly, there is sim ply no recen t
precedent for such a focu s on attacking the lords at alL N ot only did the
variety o f seigneurial targets distinguish revolutionary insurrections from
the upheavals o f the seventeenth century; it distinguished them from
previous events throughout the eighteenth century as welL W hen w e look
at the insurrectionary trajectories o f different even t-types, indeed, w e see
ch oices being m ade, not blind subservience to “ tradition,” even though the
ch oices w ere made am ong largely traditional form s. And when w e see just
how scarce antiseigneurial events w ere in the early m onths o f 1789, w e see
that it is the developm ent o f rural antiseigneuriaUsm within the Revolution
itself that needs to be explained. D efining the problem o f peasant action as
the conversion o f the peasantry to an antiseigneurial outlook rooted in long
term transform ations, an outlook that is solidly in place at the onset o f the
Old Regim e’s collapse, would be to m isstate what needs to be explained.
The antiseigneurial character o f rural m obilizations was som ething that
em erged betw een the sum m er o f 1788 and the fall o f 1789. It w as not
som ething already in place, ju st awaiting release. O f cou rse that m ove
tow ard antiseigneurialism may have precursors, as in the evolution o f
subsistence m ovem ents to em brace grain raids on lords’ stock s by the tim e
o f the Flour War o f 1775 (see Chapter 5, p. 246). And seigneurial rights
may have been m ore loathed than in the past, as Chapter 3 has argued, at
the on set o f the Revolution. Yet peasants did not begin the Revolution
prim arily attacking the lords. In the disturbances o f the spring o f 1789, as
74. Sewel, “Colective Violence andCohctive Loyalties,” 540.

75. Max Weber, Economy andSociety (New Ybric Bedminster, 1968), 1:217.
the cahiers w ere being w ritten, the salience o f seigneurial targets w as higher
than it had been the previous fall; it was to rise far higher by the follow ing
falL It is not enough to explain how social structures shaped the villagers'
com plaints; w e need to grasp the p rocesses by which the seigneurial rights
becam e the prim ary target o f insurrectionary peasants.
Apart from creative deploym ent o f older form s (rather than creative
invention o f the unprecedented) and creative focu s on a relatively unusual
target, the w ay the country people organized for conflict broke new ground.
The traditional seasonal rhythm s o f contestion w ere utterly defied. If
technological advance m eans defying the constraints o f the natural w orld,
the technology o f insurrection took a great leap forw ard. The seasonal
cycle seem s to have hardly constrained insurrectionary peasants and their
antagonists at all. The plaintive appeal o f the leadership o f the district o f
Sens in Burgundy to both peasants and lords at the beginning o f August
1791 to collaborate in jointly exam ining seigneurial titles to avoid violen ce in
the harvest just ahead,76 seem s to speak from a w orld thrown over. T he
social truce that avoids mutual ruin w as not going to be observed. Social
conflict w as beginning to m ove to a social rhythm that w as no longer m ore
than minimally constrained by natural rhythm s. If m odernity has m eant the
partial em ancipation o f w ork and leisure from seasonality, the French
Revolution appears as a point at which social conflict becam e sim ilarly
em ancipated. This suggests the developm ent o f association^ m odes o f
organization that are geared to political struggle as such, rather than the
overw helm ing dom inance o f organizational structures prim arily geared to
the agrarian rhythm s o f nature and that engage in con flict only secondarily.
The m odem w orld has freed w ork-rhythm s from nature so that factories
run year-round, sexuality loses its seasonal character,77 and, our data
suggest, social conflict com es to be carried out with a life o f its ow n, too.
The w eekly m icrorhythm with its hot Sunday w as also blurred, but not
effaced, again suggesting, as Sew ell urges us to see, an organizational
developm ent o f associations! structures capable o f m obilizing people for
conflict in coexisten ce w ith communal on es. Indeed there w as an im perfect
split: religious conflict and, especially, counterrevolution rem ained struc
tured by communal life, while the central focu s o f this book, the antiseigneur-
ial events, seem likely to have been organized by both .78
76. Ado, Krestianskoe dvizhenie, 163.

77. For some evidence from one parish of the seasonal character of a sexuality inked to the
liturgical calendar, see Serge DontenwQI, Une Seigneurie sous lAncien Régime: L' “Etoile" en
Brvmnais du XVIe au XVIlIe siècle (1575-1778) (Roanne: Editions Horvath, 1973), 112. For a
general discussion, see Edward Shorter, The Making of the Modem Family (New fork: Basic
Books, 1975).
78. Might it be that one of the motivations behind the government’s incredible attempt in the late
1790s to actually enforce the official effacement of Sunday in the ten-day week of the revolutionary
T he country people thought about what they w ere doing, in choosing

their insurrectionary actions from a repertoire o f contention (in T illy’s
felicitous phrase) as they thought about what they w ere doing in choosing
which grievances to express in their cahiers. Ideas for insurrection w ere
being tried out in the revolutionary years, accepted if they w ere relatively
safe as w ell as effective, and rejected otherw ise, as show n by the rise-and-
fall pattern in the num ber o f actions per event (see Fig. 6 .1 0 ). Throughout
the eighteenth century, the lords and their rights had not been prim e
targets, although there is a shift discernible by the 1760s that is also
detectable even within the established arena o f subsistence con flict But
these small shifts in the targets o f insurrection and the corresponding shifts
in the agenda o f the cahiers (com pared to 1614; see Chapter 5, p. 266)
constitute no m ore than a rural prerevohition. A s such it is significant
enough; surely the term prerevolution, generally applied to intra-elite
quarrels since the pioneering w ork o f Jean E gret79 has a long-neglected rural
and plebeian com pon ent But the em ergence o f the enorm ous antiseigneurial
m ovem ent in the countryside dem ands, beyond explaining this rural pre-
Revolution, beyond explaining the bitterness in the cahiers tow ard seigneur
ial rights, that w e bridge what w e can now plainly see as a gap betw een the
grievances o f the early spring and the grow ing insurrectionary m om entum
in the m onths beyond.
We shall proceed on tw o tracks in trying to understand w here antisei
gneurial actions cam e from . In the m ost literal sen se w e shall explore in
Chapter 7 the regions o f France that nurtured those events, which shall be
especially valuable in understanding the long-term changes and enduring
structures that favored one sort o f rising over another. And w e shall attem pt
in Chapter 8 to reconstruct the dialogue o f French villagers and French
legislators out o f which em erged the intensity and durability o f the insurrec
tions and out o f which also em erged the depth o f the antifeudal legislation.
If w e may hope to understand the way local structures and national
politics shaped peasant action, nonetheless, w e do not know very much
about how these various form s o f action w ere put together. All o f the
evidence presented in this chapter indicates that m ore than tw o hundred
years after the Revolution, w e may have made enorm ous strides in under-
calendaradopted in 1793, was to eliminate part of the organizational nexus of popularmobilization—a

central theme of much governmental policy of the post-Thermidor moment? On the vigor of the
government’s anti-Sunday struggle, see Isser Woloch, “Republican Institutions, 1797-1799,” in
Colin Lucas, ed., The French Revolution and the Creation of Modem P>litical Culture, voL 2, The
Political Culture oftheFrench Revolution (Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1988), 371-87.
79. Jean Egret, La pri-révolutionfrançaise, 1787-1788 (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France,
1962); “La prérévolution en Provence, 1787-1789,” Annales Historiques de la Révolutionfrançaise
26 (1954): 97-126; "Les origines de la Révolution en Bretagne (1788-1789),” RevueHistorique 213
(1955): 189-215.
standing the organization, activities, and ideologies o f the urban m obilizations

but that there is a rural political universe, indeed there are forty thousand
m icro-universes, o f w hose inner w orkings w e know very little. T he path
breaking studies o f Jessenne on local electoral politics, o f Sutherland and
Tilly on m obilization for counterrevolution, o f B outier and B outry cm local
political organization, o f Dupuy chi Brittany's National Guards, throw a
spotlight cm one region or one form o f political m obilization and, in so doing,
em phasize the surrounding darkness w here m uch rem ains to be discovered.
C h apter
7
T racking Insurrection
through T ime and Space
Up to this point, w e have only exam ined the national picture o f re v o lt H ow

did France’s peasant com m unities, considered as a w hole, resem ble and
how did they differ from , France’s nobility and urban elites in the positions
they asserted at the onset o f revolution? What w ere the targets and tactics
o f rural rebels? H ow did these targets and tactics shift over tim e? France’s
forty thousand villages, how ever, w ere not engaged in nationwide coordi
nated action but in separate decisions and separate actions. A full account o f
local and regional differences would require a book at least the size o f this
(H ie, if it is not altogether beyond the scop e o f any single book. But an
exclusive focu s on the national picture risks distorting that national picture;
part o f that national picture is precisely its shadings and contours as one
travels across space as w ell as through tim e. W ithout som e attention to
the flow o f insurrectionary even ts across space, w e will not be able to
appreciate the rural situation as it confronted the revolutionary legislators in
the p rocess o f elaborating their ow n reorganization o f rural institutions.
It is not only the search for a greater accuracy in assessing the con text o f
revolutionary legislation that dem ands an exploration o f insurrectionary

geography: by taking m ethodological advantage o f the covariation o f differing
regional trajectories o f revolt with differing regional con texts, w e may
attem pt to sift through many proposed explanations o f the conditions that
prom oted those insurrections. It is precisely the decentralized character o f
rural rebellion, the separate decisions m ade in tens o f thousands o f rural
com m unities, that m akes it possible to speak o f specific local or regional
circum stances as associated with revolt (or as not associated). D o peasants
rise m ore readily, or against distinctive targets, when prices are high? W hen
a Paris-based sem ibureaucracy is in charge? W hen a village is integrated
into a national m arket? W hen literacy is high? W hen communal institutions
are strong?
Although I shall be presenting evidence that bears on a host o f such
classical and recen t questions about the character o f rural rebellion, m y
central concern is not so m uch the evaluation o f a m yriad o f separate
hypotheses and conjectures as it is the attem pt to seize the relationship o f
long-term , structural elem ents in the genesis o f revolution, on the one hand,
and the im m ediate, shifting, negotiated character o f the revolutionary
p rocess, on the other. We have a variety o f explanations o f revolution in
general, or o f the French Revolution in particular, that look to unchanging
or slow -changing “ structures” as pow erful contexts that im pel actions, in
som e accounts, or channel actions, in others. We m ight, for exam ple,
consider such a clu ster o f notions surrounding the political significance o f
literacy as the thesis that literacy increases the propensity to revolt (by
increasing the capacity for critical thought), or that it decreases it (by increasing
the capacity o f state authorities to secure the assent o f their population through
long-term educational program s and short-term propaganda), or that it channels
action against certain targets and away from others.1 These are theories o f
slow-changing structural capacities. In addition to such structural notions, w e
also have hypotheses about the impact o f immediately critical circum stances,
particularly rapidly deteriorating econom ic conditions, on the breakdown o f the
Okl Regime, a breakdown one o f w hose mqjor com ponents was rural insur
rection.
The exploration o f the covariation o f the occu rren ce o f insurrection, o r o f
particular form s o f insurrection, and such contextual circum stances, w hose
presence or severity often had considerable geographic variation, is an
im portant vehicle for weighing such explanations. One o f the principal
conclusions to be drawn from the evidence in this chapter is that structural
1. For a survey of such theories in the context of a less-developed version of the sorts of data
used here, see John Markoff, “Some Effects of Literacy in Eighteenth-Century France,"Journal of
Interdisciplinary History 17 (1986): 311-33 and "Literacy and Revolt Some Empirical Notes on
1789 in France,"AmericanJournal ofSociology 92 (1986): 323-49.
Tracking Insurrection through Time and Space 339
explanations o f the social tensions within France, while going som e w ay

tow ard explaining the occu rren ce o f open revolt and som e o f the form s that
revolt took, is nonetheless not nearly enough for understanding the rise and
decline in antiseigneurial actions that w e have seen in Chapter 6. Even
adding the conjuncture circum stances o f econom ic crisis, w hich, the data
suggest, d oes take us som ew hat further, is still not enough. Structural
con texts and econom ic conjunctures are both a vital part o f the story, but
they are not the story; w e shall still have to add som ething to understand
the risky ch oices m ade by French villagers.
How France's Regions Had Different Rural

Revolutions (and What They Had in
Common)
Anatoly A do’s pioneering research revealed a significant spatial dim ension
to the rural conflicts o f France in revolution; indeed, he pointed to a
spatiotem poral com pon en t2 The locations o f peasant actions change over
tim e. An extended discussion o f this study by A lbert Soboul em phasized the
geographic aspect o f peasant r e v o lt3 A do's w ork has since been the focus
o f critical scrutiny4 and has been utilized by other scholars trying to locate
rural even ts within the Revolution as a w hole.5 I shall follow the lead o f
these scholars here, for the shifting locations o f rural confrontation carries
im portant clues both to the conditions that nurtured insurrection and to the
character o f the dialogue o f those in the villages and those in the cen ters
o f pow er.
For this purpose, an act o f analytic sim plification is essential. We cannot
usefully follow the trajectories o f peasant action in hundreds o f bailliages.
Just as w e grouped the great range and variety o f targets o f peasant
2. See maps of “antifeudal uprisings” and subsistence conflicts at various points in time in
Anatoly V. Ado, Kmfianshoe dvizhenie to FrantsH to vremia vtlikoi burzhaznoi reooüutsü koiUsa
XVIII veka (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo Moskovskovo Universiteta, 1971), 84, 104, 155, 238. I shall
present some maps of ray own data below (and I thank Gilbert Shapiro for developing a creative
map-making computer program).
3. Albert Soboul. “Sur le mouvement paysan dans la Révolution française,” Annafes Historiques
de la Révolution Française 45 (1973): 85-101.
4. "Table Ronde: Autour des travaux d’Anatoü Ado sur les soulèvements paysans pendant la
Révolution française,” in La Révolution française et le monde rural (Paris: Editions du Comité des
TYavaux Historiques et Scientifiques, 1989), 521-47.
5. Peter M. Jones, The Peasantry in the French Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1988); Michel lfoveOe, La découverte de la politique: Géopolitique de la Révolution française
(Paris: Editions de la Découverte, 1993).
insurrection into eight or nine large "typ es” in Chapters 5 and 6, w e now
m ust provisionally reduce F rance's geographic kaleidoscope to a m anageable
num ber o f broadly conceived regions within which w e will track the ebb and
flow o f con flict T here is no standard division o f the map o f France for such
a purpose. A t the end o f his ow n w ork on the R evolution's regional variety,
in the cou rse o f which he exam ines dozens o f m aps, M ichel \fovelle proposes
thirteen regions “ w ith the feeling o f making too many or too few .”6 W ith too
many regions, (m e risks losing a coherent picture; with too few one
risks obscuring vital distinctions. For m y rough sketch o f the locations o f
insurrection, I divided France into nine broad regions.
In the rest o f this chapter, “ North” covers the area running north o f the
Paris region to the border o f the Austrian Netherlands, roughly Picardy,
A rtois, and Flanders. The “ N ortheast” runs east o f that area to the Germ an
and Sw iss frontiers: it includes A lsace and Lorraine, and continues south
through Franche-C om té; it also includes the broad plains o f Champagne.
Since (m e m ight w ell exp ect the vicinity o f France’s largest d ty by far to
have som e unique characteristics, I treated Ile-de-F rance as a zone to itself,
the “ Paris region .” A broad horizontal strip made up the “ N orth-C enter”
running from Burgundy on the east, m oving w estw ard through Orléanais
and B erry and including Touraine. Further to the South, the “ South-C enter” :
Lyonnais, Auvergne, Bourbonnais, and Lim ousin. The “ Southeast” is Dau
phiné, P rovence, and eastern Languedoc, while the “ Southw est” (P yrenees
included) stretch es w est from the w estern half o f Languedoc through
Guyenne and G ascony along the Spanish frontier including Béarn, Foix, and
Roussillon, and up the Atlantic coast past Bordeaux into southern Poitou.
T he “ W est” covers Brittany, M aine, Anjou, and northw est Poitou. U ncom
fortable with dissolving Normandy into either "W est” or “ N orth,” I counted
it as a region apart. I shall som etim es group Normandy together with N orth,
N ortheast, N orth-C enter, and Paris region into a broad “ northern France”
as contrasted with a grouped Southeast, Southw est, and South-C enter (“ the
South” ). To be able to specify precisely which events took place in w hich
regions, I identified these nine areas in practice with Old Regim e généralités
and electoral bailliages, as specified in the first o f this chapter’s tables.
O f cou rse all such classifications raise questions. It is easy to be uncom
fortable w ith the cultural and topographical diversity o f such a Southw est,
with this (or any other) divide betw een Southeast and Southw est, with
including Dauphiné in the Southeast (or, alternately, not separating the
Southeast into the M editerranean C oast and the hills and m ountains to the
north), and perhaps with adding Champagne to the N ortheast frontier rather
than grouping it with the N orth-C enter. N onetheless, I think the tables that
follow show that these distinctions do capture im portant broad differen ces
6. \bve0e, La découverte de lapolitique, 327.

T racking Insurrection through Time and Space 341
R EG IO N S
I N orth
II N ortheast
ID P aris region
IV N orth-C enter
V Sou th -C en ter
VI S outheast
vn Southw est
Vni W est
IX N orm andy
M ap 7.1. R egions, P rovin ces, and S elect Tbwns

in insurrectionary actions without being so fine-grained that all vanishes into

the m ists o f m icroscopic detail.
Table 7.1 show s the regional distributions o f all events over the entire
five years and com pares that with the area, population, and num ber o f rural
com m unities. The table also indicates for each region the percentage o f all
bailliages in which any even ts occurred (in colum n 3 ). All regions o f the
country w ere touched by the rural revolution. If there was now here in the
vicinity o f Paris that was far from som e site o f insurrection, the insurrections
o f the Southeast w ere alm ost as w idespread and made up one-fifth the total.
A t the opposite extrem e, the N ortheast had many electoral circum scriptions
w here no insurrections at all turn up in our sam ple. N orthern France
generally was less at the cen ter o f things than one m ight have expected.
Indeed, m ore than half our events occurred south and w est o f the fam ous
line from Saint-M alo to G eneva that is often taken to roughly divide an
“ advanced” countryside o f relative prosperity, open-field cereal agriculture,
cash tenancy and sm allholdings, heavy plow s and good yields, the languages
o f states (French prim arily, but also German and Flem ish) and literacy from
a South and W est o f p oor yields, hills, zones o f m akeshift expedients,
sharecropping, languages o f no state (variants o f O cdtain but also B reton
and B asque) and reduced literacy. The great m ajority o f bailliages in the
South and W est had som e form o f contestation and enter our data set, the
Southw est’s experience being the m ost m ixed.
A re any regions especially insurrection-prone? If w e juxtapose the last
three colum ns o f Table 7.1 with the second colum n w e can see w hether
insurrections are especially com m on anywhere com pared to population,
area, and the num ber o f rural com m unities. This last com parison is particu
larly notew orthy if one sees the com m unity as the social unit that organizes
insurrectionary a cts.7 Several regions stand o u t The N ortheast has a bit
few er insurrections that one might expect on the basis o f its population but
m arkedly few er in com parison to the num ber o f distinct com m unities.
D ifferently put, northeastern com m unities are by far the least likely to
m obilize o f any region. B y contrast, the Southeast is the m ost disproportion
ately explosive, having tw ice as many insurrections as its share o f population
and even m ore than that in com parison to the num bers o f its com m unities.
The m ore prosperous agriculture o f northern and eastern France did not,
then, lend its peasants any greater proneness to re v o lt
The W est is not laggard either. W hile it is not dram atically m ore active
than its share o f the French population, it is in com parison to its portion o f
France's com m unities. W estern France was an area o f dispersed farm steads,
7. This seems to have been the conception of contemporary chroniclers. As pointed out above
in Chapter 5, the-sources often identify those engaged in some action with one or more named
parishes (and more often than not with precisely one parish).
Ihble 7.1. Regional Distribution of All Events (June 1788-June 1793), Area, Population, and Communities (%)
'S
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w
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w hose people cam e together for Sunday services, sw elling, (Mice a w eek,
the population o f its central places. The w orkday dispersion o f its people
seem s to have been no hindrance to their organizing their fair share— or
m ore— o f riot and rebellion.
T he generally southern character o f revolt is even m ore m arked for
antiseigneurial events in particular. Table 7.2 show s that 62% o f antisei
gneurial events are in the South-Central, Southeastern, and Southw estern
regions. But no region is immune: the fam ously counterrevolutionary W est
still has a substantial antiseigneurial elem ent although at less than half the
level o f its share in all insurrections. And while the W est w as, indeed, m ost
distinctive for counterrevolution, the Southw est and Southeast also had their
share o f such even ts, a rather less w ell appreciated and, until recently,
understudied su b ject8 Religiously tinged events have a regional distribution
rather like the antiseigneurial, although they are rather m ore com m on in the
W est and rather less in the South-C enter and Southeast Anti-tax activities
are particularly striking in the N orth and Normandy and rather less concen
trated in the Southeast (It was in the northern area o f anti-tax clashes that
Babeuf got his start in revolutionary action.)9 The three regions w here
counterrevolution w as so strong are disproportionately low in the land
conflicts that are disproportionately high in the N ortheast. Did class conflict
and counterrevolution avoid each other’s proxim ity? N ote that the Paris
region and the North, the leaders, by far, in w age conflict, are nearly
immune from counterrevolution (but Norm andy, betw een N orth and W est,
has neither counterrevolution nor w age con flicts). Subsistence conflicts have
a significant w estern concentration that extends into neighboring Norm andy,
a province also m arked by its anti-tax events. Panics, finally, are unusually
com m on near Paris and in N orth Central France and rarer in a broadly
defined w est that includes Normandy.
Som e nuance may be added by Table 7 .3, which indicates the geographic
extent within each region o f different form s o f con flict W hile the W est is
best known for its counterrevolution, the im pressive extent o f involvem ent
8. Michel Vbvefle has pointed up the extent of rural resistance to the revolution mthe South-
Center and Southwest, but prefers not to use the term “counterrevolutioo” so broadly as I do here,
favoring the recent term "antirevolution” for the villagers’ rejection of state authority. See VaveDe,
La découverte de lapolitique- 335-38 and Chapter 5. Urban counterrevolution in the South is better
known; see, for example, GWynne Lewis, The Second Vendée: The Continuity ofRevolution m the
Department of the Gard, 1789-1815 (Oxford; Clarendon Press, 1978); J. N. Hood, "Revival and
Mutation of Old Rivalries in Revolutionary France,” Past andPresent 82 (1979): 82-115. On rural
events in the South, see Hubert C. Johnson, The Midi m Revolution: A Study ofRegional Political
Diversity, 1789-1793 (Princeton; Princeton University Press, 1986); Peter M. Jones, P>litics and
Rural Society: The Southern Massif Central, c. 1750-1880 (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1985).
9. Rose, Gracchus Babeuf: The First Revolutionary Communist (Stanford: Stanford University
Press, 1978), 55-71.
1
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TOrie 7.2. TVpe of Events by Region. June 1788-June 1793 (%)
Afote: Columns might not sum to 100% because of rounding erroc
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ought not to conceal the presence o f the rather significant third o f w estern
bailliages w here counterrevolutionary events did not happen. It is this
w estern variety that m akes possible the m ethodology o f studies like those
o f Tilly and B ois that contrast loyal with defiant subregions as w ell as
the interpretation o f Sutherland w ho sees a rural civil war (w ith outside
involvem ent).10 T he im age o f ‘‘blue" tow nsfolk in a sea o f “ w hite” peasants
(that is, pro-revolutionary urbanites and counterrevolutionary country p eo
ple) needs to b e nuanced by noting urban counterrevolution (in tow ns like
IV éguier or G uérande)11 and pro-revolutionary rural zones (like m uch o f the
eastern half o f the département o f the Sarthe,12 the Saumurois in A njou,13
and many parts o f B rittany).14 And som e one-third o f w estern bailliages had
antiseigneurial events, recalling the question posed by R oger Dupuy and
M ichel Vovelle o f the relation o f this w estern antiseigneurialism and counter
revolution. 15 A re these the sam e third that do not have counterrevolutionary
events? We shall look into this below (see p. 415). For the present w e
note that the antiseigneurial subregions o f the W est are m ore narrow ly
circum scribed than anyw here but the N ortheast (this latter point a surprise).
W hile the 257 w estern counterrevolutionary incidents that our sam ple
unearthed are far m ore num erous than w estern antiseigneurial events (119)
the latter surely deserve som e n otice; and w estern counterrevolution does
not nearly so strongly dom inate subsistence events, which w eigh in w ith a
hefty 205. T he W est’s contribution to rural turbulence, in short, goes w ell
beyond its eventual fostering o f the m ost bitterly polarized and violent
con flicts o f the entire era.
Table 7 .3 also reveals som ething im pressive about southeastern antisei
gneurialism : it is not only num erically im pressive but touched at one point
or another virtually the entire region. The Southeast, in this sen se, is the
m ost uniform ly antiseigneurial part o f the country,16 follow ed, and none too
closely, by South-Central France, in turn follow ed by the far less uniform ly
m obilized Southw est, which edges out the Paris area. To glance a m om ent
10. Sutherland, The Chouans: TheSocialOrigins ofDiputarCounterrevolution m UpperBrittany,

1770-1796 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982), 12.
11. Dupuy, De la Révolution à la Chouannerie: Paysans en Bretagne, 1788-1794 (Paris: Flamma
rion, 1988), 67-71.
12. Bois, Les Dtysans de rOuest: Des structures économiques et sociales aux options politiques
depuis Fépoque révolutionnaire dans la Sarthe (Le Mans: Imprimerie M. Vüaire, 1960), 162.
13. Titty, The Vendée (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1964), 303—4. For a very detailed
study of opposition to the insurrectionary forces withinthe vendéenheartland, see Claude Fetitfrère,
Blancs et bleus dAnjou (1789-1793) (Lille: Atelier Reproduction des Thèses, 1979).
14. Dupuy, De la Révolution à la Chouannerie, 197.
15. Dupuy, De la Révolution à la Chouannerie; Michel \bve8e, La découverte de la politique:
Géopolitique de UtRévolutionfrançaise (Paris: Editions de la Découverte, 1993), 90, 283-84.
16. Clearly, if we used units of analysis smaller than the bailliages, southeastern areas without
antiseigneurial events would be more visible.
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at the evidence on counterrevolution, w e note that counterrevolutionary

actions w ere rather w idespread in the Southeast, but very confined g e o
graphically in the Southw est T h ese, and other, differences betw een the
Southeast and Southw est show the inadequacy o f any notion o f a m ere tw o
Frances, north and south. We also see that the rural revolt against the lords
is hardly the m ere fallout o f Parisian influence or the byproduct o f the
agricultural prosperity m ost easily found in the north.
T he regional concentration o f form s o f revolt is striking. Returning to
Table 7 .2 w e see that anti-tax events had a sharp geographic focu s. Nearly
half o f our anti-tax even ts occurred in the N orth and Norm andy. The affinity
o f northern and northw estern France for anti-tax actions can also be seen
by com paring the proportions o f anti-tax actions in those regions with their
proportions o f all actions: Normandy is m ore than tw ice as likely to have
anti-tax even ts as one would exp ect from its proportion o f all rural even ts,
and the N orth m ore than three tim es. (O ne can see this by com paring Table
7.1 and Table 7 .2 .) N ot only did the aides and gabelles, tw o o f the m ost
detested Old Regim e taxes and the main fiscal targets o f rural anger (see
Table 5 .4 ) run high in the N orth and part o f Norm andy, but especially
explosive— so it would appear from the geography— was the proxim ity to
the gabelle-free zon es.of Brittany to the w est and A rtois to the north as w ell
as the very different rates for salt in low er and upper N orm andy.17 The
proxim ity o f the tw o differently taxed regions w as fam ous for generating
interzonal sm uggling.18 This sam e proxim ity, our data suggest, deserve an
equal repute as the seedbed o f insurrection.
O ne’s first thought is to see this as evidence o f the centrality o f grievance
in the gen esis o f contestation. In this view the sheer w eight o f burden w as
exacerbated by the visibility o f freedom as the crucial elem ent in grievance.
Such an interpretation would have been very pleasing to those w ho used to
17. According to the map provided by Jacques Necker, the going price for salt in Artois m 1780
was a low seven to eight livres for a minot of salt and in Brittany an almost insignificant one ivre
ten sous to three livres. (Brittany and Artois were also part of "the provinces where the aides do
not apply,” as the administrative formula ran.) In lower Normandy, where it was permitted to
extract salt from seawater, the price rose to thirteen livres. By contrast, in upper Normandy salt
sold for over fifty-four livres, in Picardy (adjacent to Artois) fifty-seven to fifty-nine. (Lower
Normandy and Picardy had the misfortune of being part of the "provinces of the Great Salt Thx.”)
See Jacques Necker, Compie rendu au roi (Paris: Imprimerie Royale, 1781), appended map (“carte
des gabelles”).
18. One catches a glimpse of these smugging networks in Necker's observations on the annual
arrest rates at the southeast border of Brittany in the 1780s. Some 23,000 men were employed at
great expense to control salt smuggling and failed, as shown by, among other things, some 6,600
arrests of children each year around Laval and Angers. The children were held only briefly, then
released to smuggle some more (De radministration des finances [Paris: n.p., 1784], 1:195;
2:30-31, 57-58). Necker’s report on the state of royal finances sketches this wdhdevdoped
criminal world, beyond eradication, in his view, unless tax reform reduced the incentives to
smuggling. See Compte rendu, 100-109.
argue for the revolt-generating significance o f "relative deprivation” (the

sen se that com pared to others (Hie was inadequately rew arded).19 Perhaps
such resentm ents would explain the clustering o f anti-tax revolt around the
borders o f Brittany and A rtois as w ell as the divide betw een low er and
upper Norm andy, but there is an alternative hypothesis less oriented to
affect and m ore to capacities. The extensive developm ent o f sm uggling
around those border areas, far m ore for contraband salt than contraband
w ine,20 no doubt cultivated skills and experience in reading the police and
gained considerable support and sym pathy from the surrounding population.
M ight not such netw orks o f organized resistance have seized the opportunity
for open challenge that em erged in 1789? Salt-sm uggling may have been a
crim e to the agents o f tax-farm ers but hardly to the ordinary people o f
Norm andy or Picardy. T he crow d that rescued a man seized for filling his
hom e with contraband tobacco at Laon in N ovem ber 1789 was ju st one o f
many such actions.21 Certainly the m om ent would seem to have been a
propitious one for tax re v o lt For all the loathing the indirect taxes inspired
in the cahiers (see Chapter 3, p. 100), the National A ssem bly at first opted
to maintain them tem porarily until a new taxation structure could be put in
place.22 The A ssem bly thereby created a situation in which aggrieved
peasants knew w ell that the new legislators opposed these taxes, too,
even w hile continuing them in force. Under these circum stances, what is
rem arkable is that there w ere not even m ore anti-tax risings than there
w ere (see Chapter 5, pp. 2 3 3 -3 7 ).
W ere favorable opportunities for action seized by people already oriented
to surreptitious struggles with police and courts over taxes or did those
opportunities provide the channels into which an am orphous and previously
unorganized resentm ent could flow ? The data w e have presented so far,
aggregated to a large area like our "region ,” do not distinguish betw een our
social-psychological account o f burning anger and our structural-organiza
tional account o f capacities and netw orks. L et us consider a finer analysis,
(m e that can explore m ore precisely ju st w here within these broad regions
19. See James C. Davies, “The J-Curve of Rising and Declining Satisfactions as a Cause of Some
Great Revolutions and a Contained Rebellion,” in Hugh Davis Graham and Ted Robert Gurr, eds.,
TheHistory of Violence mAmerica (New York: Bantam, 1969), 415-36; Ted Robert Gurr, WhyMen
Rebel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970); Ivo K. Feierabend and Rosalind L Feierabend,
“Aggressive Behavior within Polities, 1948-1962: A Cross-National Study,” Journal of Conflict
Resolution 10 (1966): 249-71.
20. Matthews, The Royal General Farms m Eighteenth-Century France (New Yoric Columbia
21. See Ramsay, The Ideology of the Great Fear: The Soissonnais in 1789 (Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1992), 178. Ramsay reports several other incidents in which tax revolt
appears to grow out of smuggling.
22. The gabelle was ended officially in March 1790, the aides one year later and the other indirect
taxes at intermediate dates. See Matthews, GeneralFarms, 278.
the anti-tax rebellions took place, with the goal o f distinguishing the tw o
th eses. And on ce w e are launched on such an analysis, let us recall that the
third m ost insurrection-prone arena, as far as taxes w ere concerned, is the
W est If w e disaggregate “ the W est” so that w e separate tax-free Brittany
from neighboring (and heavily taxed) M aine and Anjou, could it be that it is
along the w estern edge o f Brittany w here m uch o f this w estern trouble is?
The “ resentm ent th esis" suggests that when w e exam ine the border
betw een low and high gabelle zones in the three regions that account for
62% o f all anti-tax even ts, w e will find many troubles on the high-tax side,
especially near the frontier, and few on the low -tax side at alL The “ netw ork
o f resistance th esis" suggests that w e will find many troubles near the
border on both sides, that is, w here such smuggling netw orks operated. D o
anti-tax incidents, then, cluster near the boundaries o f gabelle zon es, and, if
so, do they clu ster on one side or on both?
L et us now look at the data for the precise location o f anti-tax even ts in
the W est, the North, and Normandy (are these events near the eastern
border o f Brittany, the southern border o f A rtois, and the southern boundary
o f low er N orm andy?). T here is a scattering o f anti-tax troubles on the
B reton side o f the provincial border; there is also an outbreak deep in
w estern Brittany in August 1792 with incidents around Concarneau, Gourin,
and Quim perlé that are part o f the buildup to counterrevolution;23 the clear
m ajority o f w estern anti-tax events, how ever, are ju st outside o f Brittany,
across the border in the bailliages o f Le M ans and A ngers, supplem ented
by lesser num bers in the bailliages of M am ers and P oitiers.24 If w e set
aside, then, the later protests against revolutionary taxation, perhaps
especially bitterly received in previously privileged Brittany,25 the prepon
derance o f the rem aining incidents are along the Old Regim e taxation
fron tiers. If w e look along the southern boundary o f low -tax A rtois, w e see
som ething quite sim ilar the bailliages o f A bbeville, Am iens, and S t Quentin
23. See Dupuy, De la Révolution à la Chouannerie, 254. Among anti-tax incidents in my sample
taking place from September 1791 on (by which time revolutionary taxation was being put in place),
82% were in the West
24. As one instance: In December 1789 a large group from a village near Le Mans broke into the
house of a former employee of the salt-tax agency, who was accused of still practicing his occupation
despite the new legislation, smashed some of his furniture and insulted his wife, leaving only after
she agreed to buy them drinks at the nearby cabaret See Victor Duchemin and Robert Triger, Les
premières troubles de la Révolution dans la Mayenne: Etudes sur Vétat des esprits dans les différentes
régions de ce département (Mamers: Fleury et Dangin, 1888), 53-54.
25. In parts of Brittany, revolutionary tax reform doubled the tax burden of the country people
(Sutherland, Chouans, 134-38). And in the Vendée, Alain Gérard has shown that the Revolution
rather drastically shifted the tax burden away from some places onto others; the regions losing out
one is hardly surprised to learn, became the center of the western counterrevolution. No wonder
four-fifths of those among our anti-tax events that involve the new taxation are western. See Alain
Gérard, Pourquoi la Vendée? (Paris: Armand Colin, 1990), 191-92.
are the cen ters o f anti-tax events, seconded a bit to the south by R oye and
N oyon. We are in B a beu fs country, for sure. This is to be com pared to a
m ere sprinkling o f insurrection north o f the border. H ere the low -tax zone,
then, has few events. The Norman anti-tax theater is a bit different; the
m ajor cen ters are also clustered at the boundary betw een the fairly low -tax
low er Norm andy and the rest o f the province, but the bailliage o f Caen,
w here I have found eleven anti-tax events, is on one side o f the line and
D om front, with nine, (Hi the other. The B reton and Artesian frontiers, with
the lion’s share o f events a lût to the expensive side o f the provincial
frontier, then, support the resentm ent hypothesis, while the Norman evi
dence suggests that it is the implantation o f a netw ork o f tax evaders that
counts. And there w e m ust let this particular m atter stand, as far as
our statistical evidence is concerned. But w e find the evidence, in its
inconclusiveness, instructive: surely the Revolution was an opportunity both
for preexisting netw orks to act in new w ays and for those with grievances
w ho had not yet organized to do so.
The small num ber o f events that w e have found focu sed on w ages are
also highly specific regionally. T hey are concentrated from the Paris region
on northward, a prosperous area making extensive use o f paid laborers in
the fields, often in the form o f seasonal m igrants. A proletarianized Norman
countryside supported subsistence even ts.26 Struggles over land seem to
have particularly characterized the N ortheast (W as this the legacy o f lord-
com m unity-state conflict over increasingly valued forest? S ee Chapter 5, p.
251), extending w estw ard into the Paris region and the N orth, and also, if
less sharply, dow n into the Southeast. This geographic pattern is d o s e to
that displayed in P eter Jones's mapping o f the sources o f petitions to the
revolutionary governm ent on land issu es.27 It appears that, at least on those
land issues, legal appeal to distant authority and illegal assum ptions o f local
initiative w ere taking place in the sam e general areas. Pestering the
governm ent and direct action w ere not opposed form s o f action, but
com plem entary.
Struggles over taxation, land, w ages, food, and even m ore strikingly,
counterrevolution, then, are all m ore concentrated regionally than antisei-
26. Wby are there not wage actions mounted inNormandy’s increasingly proletarianized country
side directed against the merchant-employers in textile production? Did the dispersed nature of an
individual merchant’s rural employees make collective action even more difficult than it was for
laborers in the fields of nearby Picardy and De-de-France? Or did their actions take the form of a
traditional convergence on the merchant’s urban residence, perhaps thereby escaping my search
for rural events?
27. Peter M. Jones, foasantry, 146. Jones’s map is based on the selection of correspondence
received by the legislative committees dealingwiththe feudal regime published by Georges Bourgm,
Le partage des biens communaux: Documents sur la préparation de la loi du 10 juin 1793 (Paris:
Imprimerie Nationale, 1906).
gneurial battles. This is seen dearly in Table 7 .4 which presents, for each
region, the quotient o f the percentage o f specific types o f even ts by that
region’s percentage o f all events. This figure show s how m uch m ore (o r
less) often one finds specific types o f events in a region than its percentage
o f all even ts leads one to e x p e ct A ratio o f 1.00 (the W est’s anti-tax figure,
as it happens) m eans that the propensity o f that region to have that type o f
event is neither higher nor low er than for even ts generally. We may speak
o f the “ relative proportion” o f the W est’s events that are antiseigneurial,
religiously tinged, etc. We see that m ost kinds o f events have at least one
region w here they are at least tw ice as com m on as the generality o f even ts,
but that antiseigneurial events (as w ell as the religiously tinged) lack such
a sharp geographic focu s. Even the W est, with proportionately few er
antiseigneurial events than the other regions— less than half o f what one
would expect if its share o f France’s antiseigneurial events w ere the sam e
as its share o f all insurrections— still has a substantial num ber o f such
con flicts. And the relative proportion o f antiseigneurial even ts in m uch o f
northern France (N orth-C enter, North, and Norm andy) is only insignificantly
greater than in the W est A t the other extrem e, the region w hose insurrec
tions w ere m ost disproportionately prone to antiseigneurial targets, the
Southw est (follow ed d osely by the South-C enter and Southeast), is only
about one and one-half tim es m ore likely to have antiseigneurial than other
even ts.28 (Com pare the North’s propensity to anti-tax actions, Normandy’s
to anti-tax or subsistence events, the N ortheast’s to land con flicts, the Paris
region’s to w age conflicts, and the W est’s to counterrevolution. )
Panics and subsistence struggles occurred in m ore bailliages than did
overt challenges to the lord and his claim s. If w e take a broader, regional
perspective, how ever, w e see that panics and subsistence struggles are
m ore clearly m arked by their regional character than are antiseigneurial
ones. Although w idespread, they w ere also Carriers o f potential division (a
“backward” countryside prey to irrational rum or vs. an “ advanced” country
side o f cool reason; a food-producing vs. a food-purchasing peasantry).
Table 7 .4 certainly show s variation in antiseigneurial intensity and, as w e
shall see, if w e exam ine separately the different m om ents o f the unfolding
revolution, w e will find very m arked regional differences in the tim ing o f
antiseigneurial actions. But Table 7.4 also show s that com pared to other
form s o f conflict, no region dom inates, nor is any m issing from , the
28. These overall regional patterns are inconsistent with the reputation the North has sometimes
hada&the heartland of the Revolution's revolt in general or of its antiseigneurial actions mparticular.
Perhaps the occasional image of a heroically antiseigneurial North is an extension of the particular
moment when it was at the center of such actions; see, for example, William Brustein, “Regional
Social Orders in France and the French Revolution," Comparative SocialResearch 9 (1986): 145-61,
which has a very valuable and innovative discussion of the range ai targets of peasant action, but
assigns the North a uniformly antiseigneurial character that it only had briedy.
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antiseigneurial battle. If there was one form o f action that united rather than
differentiated France’s peasantries, it was the struggle against the lords.
For a revolutionary legislature seeking rural com pliance (and at tim es
rural m obilization; see Chapters 8 and 9 ), antifeudal language would be far
m ore prom ising as a global summary o f the meaning o f the revolution, than
would the language o f tax equalization, land reform , w age protection, or
even subsistence guarantees. Such projects would appeal to som e peasants
in som e regions, but would be anathema to others. Tax equalization would be
fine for peasants in high-tax zones but not for those across an adm inistrative
boundary that sheltered them . Land reform would please those disadvan
taged by current land-tenure rules but not those favored. W age relief w ould
benefit m igratory and other laborers but not those hiring them . G uaranteeing
the staff o f life, w hile keenly desired by consum ers, w as not likely to win
support o f those with m arketable surpluses and storage capacities (and
perhaps was so divisive an intracommunal issue as to be virtually suppressed
as a subject for the cahiers).28The bitter rural division over religious p olicy
is w ell known; the new regim e’s religious policies indeed are som etim es
seen as its central political blunder.2 30 The m ajor rivals to antiseigneurial
9
even ts for being truly national w ere panics, less com m on, but even m ore
w idely distributed, touching, at one point or another, three bailliages in five
(see Table 5 .1 ). But revolutionary legislators could hardly attem pt to claim
that panic w as the central experience and meaning o f the Revolution. T o the
extent that anything could, antifeudalism joined together sharecroppers and
peasant sm allholders, em ployees o f seasonal labor and their laborers, those
w ho liked protective communal rights and those w ho loathed constraining
communal regulations, those w ho m arketed their surplus grain and those
w ho bought their food in the m arketplace.
Time and Space

Table 7.1 conceals as it reveals. T he previous chapter show ed the rural
revolution to be not so m uch a tim e o f trouble as a sequence o f tim es o f
29. In light of the frequency of violence over the food supply, it is remarkable how few
communities discuss subsistence issues in their cahiers. Those that do discuss them tend to be from
regions with relatively little insurrectionary activity in 1789. This pattern suggests a widespread
avoidance of a divisive subject in the communities' public and collective statements. Those
communities that could not avoid raising contentious subjects may be demonstrating an incapacity
to work as a united whole, an incapacity that may render them unable to mount insurrection as
well—including subsistence conflicts. See John Markoff, “Peasant Grievances and Peasant Insurrec
tion: France in 1789 "Journal ofModem History 62 (1990): 445-76.
30. John McManners, The French Revolution and the Church (New York: Haiper and Row, 1969),
38; François Furet and Denis Richet, La Révolution française (Paris: Fayard, 1973), 127-28.
Tracking Insurrection through Time and Sfmce 355
troubles. We need to study the changing geography o f re v o lt Table 7 .5

show s the geography o f su ccessive w aves o f insurrectionary even ts: it
displays, separately, the regional distributions o f even ts for the initial
ascending trajectory o f the sum m er o f 1788 to the w inter o f 1789, the
subsequent insurrectionary peaks (see Chapter 6, pp. 2 7 0 -9 9 ) and the
valleys betw een those peaks.*31 T here are a num ber o f surprises. T he early
prologue to the storm s to com e (the first row o f the table), at least in this
collection o f data, is easily dom inated by w estern France; as w estern-
dom inated, indeed, as is the counterrevolutionary explosion o f M arch 1793.
This w estern prelude was m ade up entirely o f subsistence events w ithout
antiseigneurial or any other adm ixtures.
R oger Dupuy has suggested that the W est, early on, show s a rural
activism not obviously com m itted along the lines o f the divisions to com e.32
In Brittany, starting in June 1788, crow ds, with significant peasant participa
tion, w ere stopping grain bound for England; such actions, first noted in the
ports and then spreading inland, w ere sufficiently alarming that by August,
the provincial intendant asked priests to read a calm ing announcem ent to
the effect that such exports w ere lawful under the recently negotiated free-
trade treaty. This may w ell have been the first o f the many, many attem pts
(see Chapters 8 and 9) o f those w ho saw them selves as reform ers to calm
the good people o f the countryside by instructing them in the w isdom o f
the new legislation. The treaty contained, after all, a provision for state
intervention if prices clim bed above an intolerable threshold. The country
people (and, in these subsistence events, their urban allies) w ere not apt
pupils for this attem pt at instruction in the law 's benevolence: the violen ce
continued into the fall, when the intendant asked for royal troops— and w as
turned down; by N ovem ber 1788, with the E states-G eneral beginning to
loom ahead, the royal officials did not judge it prudent to greet fears o f
hunger with fo rce .33 O ver the next few years, the revolutionary governm ent
Timothy Tackett has dearly established the great regional differences in Catholic practice on the
eve of the Revolution that made revolutionary legislation in this area highly likely to run afoul of
some region’s deeply held tradition. Virtually any national reform would have violated some region’s
distinctive sense of the proper institutions for Christianity. See 'Ihckett, Religion, Revolution and
Regional Culture m Eighteenth-Century France: The Ecclesiastical Oath of 1791 (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1986).
31. A few brief intervals did not seem easily assignable to a peak or valley; I omitted them rather
than muddy the waters. There were not, for example, enough events in May 1790 to subject that
month to a scrutiny of its own yet it was not obvious to me whether to group May with the previous
or the subsequent several months. I simply dropped May from the analysis presented here and
later in this chapter.
32. Dupuy emphasizes the capacity of Breton communities both to loot châteaux in 1790 and rise
against the conscription of 1793. He goes on to argue that “to revolt against the abuses of feudalism
does not forever immunize you against all counter-revolutionary behavior” (De la Révolution à ¡a
Chouannerie, 330).
33. Dupuy, De la Révolution à la Chouannerie, 43-48.
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interm ittently assum ed the role o f tutor; France’s villagers continued to be

p oor students.
From the W est to the N orth and the Southeast: in the spring o f 1789 (th e
secon d row o f the table), northern France generates a rapidly rising num ber
o f even ts, a p rocess especially m arked in the N orth. iW o-thirds o f these
northern spring events concern subsistence but one in four now focu ses on
the rights o f the lords. T he Southeast has also em erged as a m ajor
insurrectionary area and as a leader in antiseigneurial action s.34 W hile m ore
than half o f southeastern events o f the spring are also su bsisten ce-focu sed,
alm ost one-third have an antiseigneurial a sp ect But the antiseigneurial
propensity is even m ore m arked around Paris w here rather few er than half
the spring even ts involve the food supply and three-quarters are directed at
the seigneurial regim e.
T he early m obilization in the W est m ight be taken as bearing out R oger
Dupuy’s observation o f a “ precociou s politicization” in the countryside
there35— and an im portant indication that the insurrectionary politics o f the
countryside w as keenly sensitive to the actions o f m en o f wealth and pow er.
T he B reton elite scen e w as unusually polarized at an early date, and the
prelude to the convocation o f the E states-G eneral unusually bitter, w ith an
increasing tension betw een a radicalizing urban com m oner elite and an
intransigent nobility and upper clergy, the latter ultim ately refusing to
participate in the election s when they failed to get them to p roceed in the
form they w anted. Jean E gret show ed in a classic essay how the struggle
ov er the E states-G eneral drew on urban collective actions, in the form s o f
pitched battles in m ajor tow ns;36 Dupuy now urges us to see the w hole
period leading up to the convocation as a fruitful opportunity for peasant
action as w ell, as the old order cam e apart at the top. From the sum m er o f
1788 on, in fact, the B reton nobility attem pted to gain the support o f
peasants in their struggles with the king on the one hand and the non-noble
urban elites on the other, by circulating a great deal o f literature in B reton
as w ell as French. The urban notables replied w ith their ow n pam phlet
counterattack.37 In the countryside, the rioting began.
Som ething o f the sam e m ight be said o f the spring even ts o f P rovence,
w hich, if not quite so early as the B reton clashes, w ere distinguished for the
degree to which they w ere beginning to shift to antiseigneurial actions.
34. The number, scale, diversity of targets, and violence of some of these events in Provence
had a terrifying impact that is vividly conveyed in Monique Cubells, Les horizons de la liberté: La
naissance de la Révolution en Provence, 1787-1789 (Abc Edisud, 1987), 92-110.
35. Roger Dupuy, De la Révolution à la Chouannerie, 19.
36. Jean Egret, "Les origines de la Révolution en Bretagne (1788-1789),” RevueHistorique 213
(1955): 189-215.
Again E gret has illum inated the conflicts over the political representation,383 9
and that subject has been both greatly am plified and connected to popular
m obilization by M onique C ubells.36 Like Brittany, P rovence had an intransi
gent noble elite hoping to use the w eakening o f the m onarchy to reassert its
claim s o f tradition, but in this case it was P rovence’s fief-holding nobles w ho
had lost their exclusive right to speak for all the province’s nobility in 1639
and now w ere dem anding a Provincial E states on the old m odel (and w ished
that Provincial E states to ch oose P rovence’s delegates to the E states-
G eneral). A t the sam e tim e, elem ents o f the urban elites w ho held them
selves underrepresented in provincial affairs, in which Abe dom inated,
saw their chance. T he result was an intensive cam paign o f petitions and
counterpetitions reaching dow n into tow ns and villages as “ general assem
blies” o f the heads o f fam ilies m et to pass resolutions. Cubells finds
eleven villages o f few er than five hundred inhabitants dem anding political
representation in February 1789 (66). The provincial com mandant, at one
point, noting pam phlets circulating in Provençal, expressed his shock at the
effort o f the notables o f Sisteron to “ address the peasants and w orkers in
their usual language in order to get them to take an interest in present af
fa irs.’’40
Such efforts, it appears, not only produced an early m obilization, but one
beginning to have an antiseigneurial con ten t Perhaps Cubells’s w ork has a
clue for us there as w ell She suggests that the great division betw een a
fief-holding group o f nobles, on its way to setting a standard by which w e
could define the w ord “ reactionary,” and their non-fief-holding fellow s, m ade
the seigneurial regim e an unusually salient elem ent in the political struggles
around the E states-G eneral in P rovence. It is striking that P rovence’s
spring upheavals w ere particularly intense during those M arch w eeks in
which rural com m unities w ere form ulating their grievances, and that th ose
grievances, to judge by Cubells’s w ork on the extant cahiers o f P rovence,
usually included the seigneurial regim e, a datum w e may contrast with
the nationwide pattern o f som e quarter o f parish cahiers not m entioning
the lord s.41
W ithout a regionally differentiated study o f political rhetoric around the
convocation that has not yet been done, it is hard to be sure if debate about
the seigneurial regim e really played an unusually large role in P roven ce’s
38. Jean Egret, “La prérévohitkm en Provence,” Annales Historiques de la Révolution Française
(1954): 97-126.
39. Cubells, Horizons de la liberté.
40. Quoted in ibid, 68.
41. Eighty-eight percent of the cahiers Cubells found hadantiseigneurial grievances. Since nearly
two-thirds of the surviving documents are from a single bailliage (Aix), the cautions that apply to
my attempts to use our own parish sample to characterize regions also apply to Cubeb’s study.
See Table 2.2 and Cubells, Horizons de la liberté, 136.
T racking Insurrection through T ime and Space 359
elite squabbles. But it is certain that elite politics in Brittany and P rovence
w are am ong the m ost polarized in France, perhaps the m ost polarized. All
or a significant part o f the nobility refused participation in the election s o f
the E states-G eneral in both Brittany and P rovence, for exam ple, and these
w ere also am ong the m ost propitious provinces fo r early peasant action.42
In P rovence it also may be that a particular elite bitterness around fief
holding helped open the w ay for peasant antiseigneurialism . T h ese are the
sorts o f things that som e students o f social m ovem ents like to call “ political
opportunity stru ctu re,” by which they call attention to the degree to w hich
elite activities favor grassroots actions.
But let us not push this point too far. First o f all, there is an alternative
explanation for P rovence’s early turn to antiseigneurial actions. P rovence’s
countryside was probably unusually endow ed with organizational capacities
fo r popular m obilization, a m atter I shall return to below (see p. 387). And
no less im portant, in the spring o f 1789, as w e have ju st noted, the
countryside around Paris w as even m ore antiseigneurial than along the
M editerranean. D id being d o se to the cen ter o f things lead the peasants o f
the D e-de-France, earlier than m ost, to begin to see the prom ise o f
m oving against their lords? O r w ere longer-term forces at w ork here? A
Tocquevillean m ight see, behind the spring insurrections, the heavy hand o f
the state apparatus, and now here in the countryside w as it heavier than in
the vicinity o f the capital, destroying the m oral basis for the seigneurial
order. O thers m ight see the corrosive effects o f the m arketplace, and
now here in the French countryside did those effects on local structures o f
dom ination run so deep as in the vicinity o f the capital We shall take up such
structural accounts o f revolt below .
L et us m ove forw ard to the drama o f the sum m er o f 1789. In that greatest
o f peaks the action has shifted even m ore strongly tow ard the north. In the
prelude o f sum m er 1788 through early w inter 1789, a m ere 18% o f even ts
had taken place north and east o f the Saint-M alo-G eneva line; in the hot
spring 54% did; and in the hotter sum m er that cracked the Old Regim e,
67% . A s w e m ove beyond the sum m er let us sim plify our data to ease the
intertem poral com parison o f interregional com parisons. We shall be looking
42. It might be useful to contrast the situation of Brittany and, espedaly, Provence with
Franche-Comté where a group of fief-holding nobles were similarly intransigent into the spring of
1789, holding out for a revived Provincial Estates in its seventeenth-century form as the body to
name deputies to the Estates-GeneraL But in Franche-Comté, a significant minority of fief-holding
nobles rejected the intransigent actions (rather more than one-third at noble assemblies took a more
accommodationist stance); the Third Estate leadership avoided alienating such moderates by soft-
pedaling the seigneurial rights, a very touchy matter in this province of serfdom; and hardly anyone
attempted to rouse the townsfolk, let alone the countryside. In this climate, there was very little
peasant mobilization before July. See Jean Egret, “La Révolution aristocratique en Franche-Comté
et son échec," Revue diHistoin Moderne et Contemporaine 1 (1954): 245-71.
at those m om ents w hen particular regions w ere disproportionately en

gaged— and at what they at those m om ents w ere engaged in. We shall
organize this discussion around Table 7 .6 , which show s the regions that are
disproportionately higher in the occu rren ce o f insurrections at particular
m om ents. The table presents figures for only those locations in space-tim e
in which the proportion o f incidents w as at least 1.25 tim es the overall
proportion for a particular region. For exam ple, the sum m er o f 1789 show s
a concentration o f even ts in the area around Paris in the specific sen se that
during that sum m er its proportion o f even ts w as 1.35 tim es its usual
proportion. We can then query our data as to the form s o f action in that
countryside near Paris that sum m er. Thus w e can see the tim es and the
w ays a region was unusually active, region by region.
The sum m er o f 1789 turns out to be the unique m om ent o f “ advanced”
rural France; every northern region excep t Norm andy disproportionately
m obilized and now here else did. T h ere are a num ber o f other m om ents at
which the N ortheast or Paris region or even the usually quieter N orth-
C enter jum ps forw ard and many at which the N orth is active, but at no oth er
tim e are they all in the lead, with the rest o f France playing a less prom inent
role. This northern explosion w as significantly, but not predom inantly,
antiseigneuriaL T hirty-eight percent o f these northern sum m er even ts are
incidents o f the G reat Fear; antiseigneurial even ts are in the secon d rank,
now notably ahead o f subsistence conflicts (30% to 13% ).
B y the fall o f 1789 it is the Southw est that is at the cutting ed ge o f rural
action, joined a few m onths later by the South-C enter (and the W est); the
Southw est and South-C enter rem ain intensely active, m ost o f the tim e, until
the spring o f 1792 (w ith a last, intense southw estern hurst in the early
sum m er). O ver the 34 m onths from Septem ber 1789 through January 1792,
76% o f these South-Central and Southw estern events w ere antiseigneuriaL
A s if a player in a southern relay team , the Southeast takes up the baton
in the w inter o f 1792 and continues, a bit irregularly, in the forefron t until
the end o f our period, only displaced in the fall o f 1792 by the N orth-Central
area (a burst o f subsistence even ts)43 and by the w estern counterrevolution
43. A vast movement of price control, whose epicenter was about halfway between Chartres and
Le Mans was the terror of local officials in November and December 1792. A nucleus of foresters
and workers from a large glassworks moved through the countryside, picking up large numbers of
villagers (sometimes, it appears, coercively) and converged on the towns across some eight
departments. The reported numbers are hard to believe (ten thousand assembling before Chartres
on December 1, for example, a figure that, if true, must have been terrifying since the crowd would
have outnumbered the townsfolk). National Guard units seem to have participated on both sides of
the confrontations; local officials, no doubt with varying degrees of voluntary assent, often joined.
It seems likely that previous experience was paying off in the development of an organizational
capacity to mount such huge efforts whose size seems to have increased with practice. Villagers
armed with axes and scythes, as in the disturbances of 1789, as VbveDe observes, now were flanked
by the uniformed Guards, and were heralded by flags and drums. As if bearing portable maypoles
o f M arch 1793. Sixty percent o f southeastern even ts from February 1792

on are antiseigneurial; at the high point o f w inter 1792, 76% .
Varying com binations o f northern regions interm ittently join th ese largely
southern m obilizations that follow ed the breakthrough o f the first sum m er
erf revolution. T he N orth and its w estern neighbor, Norm andy, w ere active
in the fall o f 1789, as w as the N orth in the spring o f 1790, the N ortheast and
Paris region in the spurt o f the sum m er o f 1790, the N orth and Norm andy
again the follow ing sum m er (w ith the N orth a continuing cen ter o f activity
into the w inter beyond that), the Paris region joining in the m ajor w ave o f
early 1792, an unusually intense period in the N orth-C enter in the fall o f
1792 (th e subsistence actions m entioned above) and som e northeastern
activism in the quieter points o f the first half o f 1793 (joined by Norm andy
from April to June). T he northern contributions at these m om ents, how ever,
w as not m arkedly antiseigneurial If w e only consider incidents in the
northern regions and at the tim es ju st m entioned in this paragraph, a
relatively scant 21% w ere antiseigneurial (and nearly half o f this group o f
antiseigneurial even ts w ere from one region at one m om ent, the Paris area
in the sum m er o f 1790). But let us not forget that even this “ scant” 21% is
substantially higher than was typical o f the prelude o f rising rural action in
the sum m er and fall o f 1788.
Was the West a Different World?

T he W est44 w as relatively inactive in the wake o f its very precociou s leap
into revolution in late 1788, but m obilized after the sum m er o f 1789 at a
steady, if lesser, level o f intensity and like the South-C enter, although a bit
earlier, falls away in early 1792. Unlike the South-C enter it m akes a
com eback in the late sum m er and maintains an engagem ent that, o f cou rse,
peaks in M arch 1793. Table 7 .7 displays the nature o f the W estern even ts
com pared to the rest o f the country in the tw o long periods o f w estern
activism that lie betw een its initial, early outburst o f subsistence even ts and
the counterrevolutionary explosion. B ecause northern and southern France
as emblems of self-activation, the participants sported oak sprigs, especially the foresters among
them. During those three weeks, the confrontations with the authorities unfolded everywhere in
the same manner, but the price demanded varied, as if to suit local conditions. See Albert Mathiez,
La vie chin et le mouvementsocial sous la Terreur (Paris: Payot, 1927), 104-6; and in much greater
detail, Michel Vovelle, Ville et campagneau dix-huitième siècle: Chartres et la Beauce (Paris: Editions
Sociales, 1980), 245-54. For the population ai Chartres in 1789, see Statistique de la France (Paris:
Imprimerie Royale, 1837), 270.
44. This Western trajectory is dearer in Thble 7.5.
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Tracking Insurrection through T ime and Space 363
are so different in our previous tables, I have grouped the data for the rest
o f France into th ese tw o very broadly con ceived zon es.45
In the period betw een the sum m er o f 1789 and the spring o f 1792
W esterners w ere less given to rise against the seigneurial regim e than
others w ere if th ose others are taken to be the rest o f France as a w hole.
T here is no surprise there, but if w e separate those others into northerners
and southerners w e see that rural northern activists actually w ere targeting
the lords even less than their w estern fellow s. T he true hard-core peasant
antiseigneurialism was in the M id i From the end o f sum m er in 1792
antiseigneurialism w as foiling o ff nationally (see F igs. 6 .3 (a H d )); and w e
now see that it foils considerably in W est, N orth, and South alike, virtually
disappearing in the W est, to be sure, but not very m arked in the N orth.
Only the South w as still bearing high the antiseigneurial torch —and less
high than before.
In thq wake o f the sum m er breakthrough in 1789, w estern peasants, like
those elsew here in France, turned against the seigneurial regim e.46 T heir
risings w ere m ore likely to involve religious m atters, but then, fo r this
region o f w idely scattered farm steads, the Sunday com ing-together m ay
w ell have been an alm ost unique m om ent o f communal solidarity. On the
other hand, conflicts that could pit the desperate against the relatively w ell-
o ff over subsistence, land, or w ages, w ere all about as com m on in the W est
as in the South up to the w inter o f 1792. The N orth, then and later, is the
hom e o f subsistence even ts, o f panics, and o f the relatively uncom m on w age
conflicts. And counterrevolutionary even ts w ere notably m ore frequent in
the W est w ell before M arch 1793.
So the W est, like the South-C enter and Southw est, takes up insurrection
after the northern risings and the legislative breakthroughs o f the sum m er
o f 1789, and participates in antiseigneurialism as d oes the rest o f the country
(largely in the extensive risings in eastern Brittany in the w inters o f 1790
and 1791).47 But the W est nonetheless has its points o f distinction: these
distinctive traits becom e w ily m ore m arked in the late sum m er and fall o f
1792. This is a period, w e recall from Chapter 6 (see Figs. 6 .3 (a H d ) and
6 .4 ), when antiseigneurialism eqjoyed a final spurt, and then died away in
the wake o f the legislation brought about by the August overturning o f the
m onarchy (see Chapter 8, p. 465). Land and w age even ts rem ain less
characteristic o f the W est, and religious even ts m ore so, w hile subsistence
45. h Thble 7.7, “North” aggregates North, Northeast, Paris Region, North-Central, and
Normandy; and “South,” South-Central, Southeast, and Southwest
46. The western countryside also participated at high levels in the elections of 1790 (Melvin
Edelstein, “La reception de la Révolution en Bretagne: étude électorale,” paper presented at
conference on Pouvoir Local et Révolution, Rennes, 1993).
47. Henri Sée, “Les troubles agraires en Haute-Bretagne, 1790-1791,” Bulletin ¿Histoire
Economique de la Mmtution Française (1920-21): 231-373.
Table 7.7. Western Rurtiápatkm in Revolution Compared to Rest of France: Insurrections o f Various "types (% )
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even ts rem ain in betw een the northern and southern proportions. But
w estern antiseigneurial action has alm ost com pletely ceased, replaced by a
d ea r com m itm ent to counterrevolution,48 w hose inddence continues virtu
ally nonexistent in the N orth. C ounterrevolution, present in the South,
rises, as in the W est, but only barely.
From the point o f view o f the prehistory o f counterrevolutionary d v il w ar
historians are becom ing increasingly sensitive to the degree to which actions
o f the revolutionary regim e sparked peasant resistance. It is not always
p ossible, indeed, to distinguish neatly betw een peasant violen ce intended to
push the governm ent to g o further and peasant violen ce intended to push
the governm ent to go aw ay.49 Som e historians, for exam ple, now ask, “ W hy
not the South also?” since som e o f the sam e circum stances that characterize
the W est also obtained in parts o f that region as w ell, especially in the
southern M assif C en tral50 T he data w e have been exam ining d oes not
answ er such questions but it d oes sharpen them . W e see that W est and
South not only differ fairly early in their inddence o f counterrevolutionary
rebellion, but that the incidence rises in both— yet rises so m uch m ore
steeply in w estern France. W estern popular m obilizations against conscript
ion, adm inistrative reorganization, the new church o f the Revolution, revolu
tionary taxation, and land purchase by urbanites increase sharply in an
ascent as rapid as antiseigneurialism is in decline. T he W est’s double
shift— away from antiseigneurialism and tow ard counterrevolution— is part
o f the national trends,51 yet the steepness o f both shifts in the W est is
paralleled now here else.
48. An example: As late as the end of August 1792, National Guard units from two cantons
burned a château east of Baugé at about the same time as panicky villagers nearby attacked
suspected counterrevolutionaries. This was rather late for a western antiseigneurial action. A half-
year later in the same vicinity, it was counterrevolutionary action that turns up in our datafor March
1793. See Ado, Kresfianskoe dvuhenie, 288.
49. The work of Cohn Lucas on peasant “antirevolution" outside the West has been especially
instructive. See Colin Lucas, “Aux sources du comportement pobtique de la paysannerie beaiqo-
laise,” m La Révolution française et le monde rural (Paris: Editions du Comité des Travaux
Historiques et Scientifiques, 1989), 345-65; “Resistances populaires à la Révolution dans le sud-
est,” in Jean Nicolas, ed., Mouvements populaires et conscience sociale, XVIe-XIXe siècles (Paris:
Maloine, 1985), 473-85; “The Problem of the Midi in the French Revolution,” Transactions of the
RoyalHistoricalSociety 28 (1978): 1-25.
50. See, for example, PeterJones, Peasantry, 219-22. A part of the answer as to why there was
no southern rural dvil war amounts to a challenge to the question. In the southern Massif Central
and in Provence there was, as our data confirm, a considerable number of "antirevolutionary”
events as early as the summer of 1790, but local initiatives ranging from village strike forces in the
departments of Lozère and Ardèche to the National Guard units of Marseille kept organized
counterrevolution from securing control of the countryside. In other words, there was a rural dvil
war in the southern hill country, but the whites did not achieve the same successes as they were to
have in, say, Anjou.
51. Melvin Edelstein’s demonstration of widespread faBoff in electoral participation by country
people between early 1790 (when they were generally outvoting the urbanites) and mid-1791 may
T h ere is yet another w ay w e m ight attem pt to look for w estern distinctive

n ess: did the w estern countryside differ in d ie exten t o f peasant antisei-
gneurialism in the cahiers o f spring 1789? Our sam ple o f parish docum ents,
unfortunately, w as designed for national statem ents, not regional on es,52
and I have therefore m ade little use o f these docum ents for interregional
com parisons in this bode. In the W est, the sam ple includes som e 79 parishes
drawn from five bailliages (Q uim per, Concarneau, Rennes, A ngers, Château-
du-L oir). T h ere is no reason to see this as a sam ple w ell suited to
characterize the W est (n ot the purpose o f its design), but it is our only w ay
o f even approaching the question, a question subject to som e debate in
previous research. Paul B ois’s study o f the département o f the Sarthe
anticipates R oger Dupuy in finding an initial antiseigneuriabsm to be by no
m eans incom patible w ith a later support for counterrevolution. T he subre
gions w hose cahiers w ere m ore strongly hostile to the lords, he show s,
w ere also generally those w here counterrevolution took hold.53 B ois is led
to stress the unfolding o f a political p rocess: “ It is not what the country
people thought o f the nobility and clergy in 1789 that is going to determ ine
their attitude to the Revolution a few years later” (219). But further to the
south, Charles T illy, equally persuasively, show s that subregions producing
the m ore antiseigneurial cahiers rem ained loyal to the Revolution when push
cam e to shove in 1793, a finding he u ses to attack, with som e vigor, the
notion that w estern peasants initially w elcom ed the Revolution, then turned
cm i t 545A ccepting as equally valid the data o f both B ois and Tilly should, in
itself, suggest that there probably is no general relationship at all o f a
collective position on seigneurial rights in the spring o f 1789 in the cahiers
and subsequent assum ption o f the risks o f violent confrontation o f one sort
or another dow n the road.56
If w e are willing, with how ever many grains o f salt, to let the grievances
o f our five w estern bailliages represent the W est early in the Revolution,
this is the conclusion about the W est that one com es to: neither the B ois
nor the Tilly pattern are general. T he data, for what they are w orth, are not
consistent with the picture o f a w estern peasantry on a different cou rse than
well, as he suggests, similarly indicate a widespread peasant disenchantment. See Melvin Edelstein,
“Electoral Behavior During the Constitutional Monarchy (1790-1701): A ‘Community’ Interpreta
tion,” in Renée Waldinger, Philip Dawson, and laser Woloch, TheFrench Revolution and the Meaning
of Citizenship (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1993), 105-21. For a similar interpretation of rural
voting, focused on the heartland of the coming counterrevolution, see Charles T9ly, “Some
Problems in the History of the Vendée," American HistoricalReview SI (1961): 29.
52. Gilbert Shapiro andJohn Markoff, Revolutionary Demands: A ContentAnalysis of the Cahiers
deDoléances of1789 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), chap. 12.
53. Bois, Paysans de l'Ouest, 190-219.
54. Tilly, Vendée, 175-86.
55. For a more detailed exploration of the relationship of cahiers grievances and the revolts of
spring and summer see Markoff, “Peasant Grievances and Peasant Insurrection.”
the rest o f the country from the very beginning. T he w estern parishes in
our sam ple appear no less focu sed on the seigneurial regim e in their cahiers:
84% o f our w estern parishes address the seigneurial regim e as com pared to
77% for France as a w hole (see Table 2.2), the m ean num ber o f relevant
dem ands am ong those cahiers treating the regim e is 7 com pared to 6 for
France as a w hole (see Table 2 .3 ). The w esterners also seem no less hostile
to those seigneurial institutions discussed: 39% o f their dem ands are calls
for abolition w ithout com pensation as com pared to 36% for the entire
kingdom (see Table 3 .1 ). W hile the uncertain character o f the sam ple and
the variation o f the bailliages within it,56 make any claim for great accuracy
here unwarranted, the data are consonant w ith D u p u /s sen se o f a fluid
situation, o f a live w estern antiseigneuriaüsm . A t the on set o f revolution, if
w e credit the data, the w estern countryside w as not less antiseigneurial
than anyw here else.
It appears that the W est’s cou rse diverged from the rest not so m uch by
being utterly different, but by going further and faster along a road follow ed
elsew here as w ell.57 W hat happened in the W est, then, w as not sim ply ju st
there from the beginning, but evolved as country people evaluated changing
situations, including changes brought about by their ow n previous action s.58
Northern France Falls Quiet

Intense engagem ent o f the northern and eastern countryside w as far m ore
episodic. T he N ortheast, the m ost intensely m obilized area in the sum m er
o f 1789 w ith 264 even ts, 140 o f them antiseigneurial, becam e far less active,
excep t for a few episodes, practically dropping out o f the Revolution as
M ichel Vovelle rem aries.59 In the sum m er o f 1790 there w as a w ave o f
panics, although nothing on the scale o f the G reat Fear, and a sprinkling o f
antiseigneurial even ts; at a num ber o f points in 1793 it w as the prim e
location o f land con flicts, but the usual state o f the N ortheast com pared to
56. The parishes we have sampledfrom Ch&teau-du-Loirare strikinglyless prone to aitiseigneur-

ial grievances thanthe others.
57. Donald Sutherland’s general history of the Revolution assigns a central place to just such a
widespread and increasing tempo of plebeian resistance to revolutionary authority in counterpoint
with growing revolutionary radicalism, as noted in his title: Fnmct 1789-1815: Revolution and
Counterrevolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 1966). For an interpretation of the Vendée
in such terms see Gérard, Pourquoi la Vendit?
58. A depiction of a Brittany where antiseigneurialism is succeeded by counterrevolution, rather
than an inevitably counterrevolutionary province just needing a good occasion to reveal its essential
nature, is a central theme of Roger Dupu/s De la Révolution à la Chouannerie.
59. Vfoveïe poses the “apparent docility" oí parts of the Northeast as anunresolved question (La
découverte de la politique, 90).
the rest o f the country w as relatively calm . Recall that I found no incidents
at all in 46% o f northeastern bailliages (see Table 7 .1 ), a m uch greater rate
than any oth er region. But N orth-Central France is hardly m pre engaged
after that first sum m er, apart from a subsistence w ave in the fall o f 1792.
And even the Paris region, intensely active through the spring and sum m er
o f 1789, yields pride o f {dace to the South at m ost points thereafter. T he
N orth is m ore often active, although interm ittently so, into early 1792.
T he rural revolution differed in its intensity and its m ix o f actions at
different tim es and places. If northern France w as the prim e location o f the
insurrectionary thrust o f the sum m er o f 1789, the sam e could hardly be said
fo r the previous autumn in which the W est had taken the lead or the spring
in which the Paris area, alone in the North, vied with the S ou th east60 And
beyond that sum m er the South-C enter and Southw est dom inated until early
1792, su cceeded by the Southeast and the W estern counterrevolution with
a sporadically, if significantly, engaged northern France. T o be sure, fo r
certain kinds o f even ts, northern France w as usually the ce n te r the w age
struggles around Paris and the N orth, land struggles in the N ortheast, anti
tax battles in the N orth and Norm andy, subsistence conflicts in Norm andy
(and stretching w est to the N orth and south through the Paris region
through north-central France). But the largest com ponent o f the rural
revolution as a w hole, the antiseigneurial m ovem ent, w as not only n ot
prim arily a P aris-centric phenom enon, it was not even prim arily northern,
excep t at one crucial m om ent. A fter the sum m er o f 1789, northern France
struggled on over food supplies, over land, over w ages on occasion , and
m obilized in local panics. The antiseigneurial battle w as largely elsew here.
Local Contexts and Forms of Revolt in the

Summer of 1789
France as a Laboratory
T he shifting regional patterns o f revolt posed many problem s to those in
Versailles and Paris w ho thought the Revolution an opportunity to rem old
France according to their ow n vision. But it constitutes an opportunity for
later scholars. We may utilize the regional diversity in order to explore the
plausibility o f many hypotheses about the generation o f re v o lt D id long
60. A reader who took to heart the only reference to “Peasants, revolt of” in the index to the
classic history by Matines would be profoundly misled by the statement that the Paris region was
the epicenter of the rural revolution. See Albert Matines, TheFrenchRevolution (NewYxk: Grosse!
and Dunlap, 1964), 51.
term structural changes in the elaboration o f the m arket or the developm ent
o f the state so shape the interests and organizational possibilities o f France’s
villagers as to m otivate them to revolt and provide th a n the m eans to do
so? We m ay look to regions w here the m arket was m ore pervasive or w here
the hand o f the grow ing state clutched m ore tightly and see if th ose are
indeed the (daces o f re v o lt D id enduring patterns o f social organization
make it easier for som e to organize revolt than others? We may see if the
clustered settlem ents o f the N ortheast or the larger sem i-autonom ous
com m unities in the South facilitated action. Did rising literacy reshape
consciousness in the countryside? Was the extent o f econom ic hardship
decisive for m obilizations?
Such hypotheses, which abound in the literature on the French Revolution
(as they do in the grow ing com parative literature), can be investigated,
treating the great variety o f local structures and circum stance as if France
w ere a sort o f laboratory for studying the effects o f different situations, but
w ith several im portant cautions. First o f all, w e have seen that rural
contestation changes in form and in location as w e m ove through the five
years covered by our data. So w e need to be careful in attem pting to
distinguish structures and circum stances that raise the likelihood o f revolt
generally from th ose that raise the likelihood o f specific form s o f insurrec
tion. We also need to distinguish aspects o f French social structure that
nurture revolt throughout our period from those that only apply at som e
points in tim e but not others. Explanations o f attacks on the lords that are
based on the insurrectionary geography o f the sum m er o f 1789, for exam ple,
m ay be wildly m isleading because the geography shifts so profoundly
afterw ard, as w e have ju st seen . Second, w e need to consider the contagious
aspect o f insurrectionary w aves: one revolt stim ulates oth ers as the rep res
sive forces appear w eaker than previously known, as those forces are
actually w eakened by failure, and as organizational possibilities and tactics
are debated and know ledge o f successful organizational m odels and tactics
becom es w idely diffused. That a group o f nearby villages all engage in anti
tax revolt m ay not ju st be a sign that a particular region produces conditions
conducive to anti-tax struggles but that an initial su ccess is taken up by
oth ers w ho m ight have been initially inclined to attack the local m onastery
before they heard that taxes w ere a prom ising ta rg et O r the new s that the
local National Guard helped the next parish’s young m en seize the nearby
château m ight lead som e villagers to see previously unexpected opportuni
ties in form ing their ow n Guards u n it
Regional structures, then, m ay channel actions one w ay rather than
another but th ese effects may then be m agnified locally or regionally or
perhaps even nationally by exam ple. If villagers near a large tow n follow the
inspiring exam ple o f neighboring villages and bum the local château, the
im pact o f that large tow n nearby on the propensity to re v o lt w hile real,
appears m agnified in the data because som e o f those nearby château

burnings are the w ork o f peasants em ulating others. On the oth er hand, if
know ledge o f château burnings sparks similar actions throughout France,
the real im pact o f th ose big tow ns will appear attenuated in our data because
distant villages in less urbanized areas m ay be follow ing the lead o f their
m ore urbanized fellow s. T h ere are statistical techniques, none p erfect, fo r
attem pting to separate such contagion p rocesses from the effects o f tow n
size or oth er structural and conjuncture! elem ents that have been developed,
m ostly by geographers, but I shall not present such a com plex analysis
h ere, and m erely suggest a certain caution in interpreting the figures that
follow . But w e m ust bear in mind that the unfolding o f revolution is a
p rocess, is a series o f ch oices in which insurrection is significantly shaped
by the respon ses o f local lords, district and departm ental officials, and
Parisian legislators, and in which inform ation on elite view s and actions and
on the fate o f oth er villagers’ actions changes daily. T he p rocessual side o f
revolution may make a judicious w eighting o f the role o f local con text
quite difficu lt
L et us take as our point o f departure the period o f m ost intense activity
o f the entire five years, the sum m er o f 1789. (W e shall look beyond that
critical sum m er la ter.) Table 7 .8 exam ines several indicators o f the con texts
within which the form s o f rural m obilization w ere nurtured. For each o f the
indicators o f France’s political, econom ic, and social circum stances em ployed
here, I present som e indication o f its relationship with each o f the types
o f rural event other than the w age even ts, scarce that sum m er, and
counterrevolution, which flourished later. I shall adopt the sim plest possible
m ode o f presentation: Each indicator shall be treated as a sim ple dichotom y.
Continuous variables (such as the proportion o f m en signing m arriage
docum ents) have been dichotom ized at the median. T o continue the exam ple
o f m ale literacy: bailliages are classified as “low ” o r “high” cm this variable
according to w hether the proportion o f m en signing is below or above .51.
Am ong those bailliages in the low and in the high groups, I com pute the
proportion that experienced each form o f rising. Continuing the sam e
exam ple, w e see that am ong bailliages o f relatively low m ale literacy 63%
experienced the G reat Fear, w hereas am ong the m ore literate districts, the
frequency o f events o f this sort drops to 43% (a statistically significant
d eclin e).61 Such significant differences may be positive or negative. W hile
61. These figures are based on a muchmore extensive body of data thanI used in several earlier
articles on the revolts of 1789: these figures, then, have more incidents of more varieties of
insurrection in more places more finely classified than the earlier data. Wide most of the daims
about the geography of revolt of the earlier research are confirmed by this more thorough data, I
shall indicate a few points where my previous published results must be modified See John Markoft
“The Social Geography of Rural Revolt at the Beginning of the French Revolution,” American
Sociological Review 50 (1985): 761-81; and "Contexts and Forms of Rural Revolt: France in 1789,”
inJournal ofConflictResolution 30 (1986): 253-89.
literacy significantly depresses panics, m ale literacy significantly augm ents

anti-tax even ts. The asterisks that indicate such statistically significant
differences62 m ay help pull the reader's eye tow ard those places in the table
w here som ething can b e said m ost confidently. (B ut patterns in w eaker
relationships may be w orth thinking about as w ell.)
For som e o f the variables used, dichotom ization at the m edian is not
m eaningful because the variables are dichotom ous by definition. W hether or
not a bailliage w as in the broad northern and eastern belt o f openfield
farm ing, for exam ple, w as coded as a sim ple dichotom y to begin w ith. In
such instances, the high category in Table 7.8 indicates “ p resen ce" and the
low , “ a b sen ce." T he data presented in this table and m ost later tables in
this chapter have been com puted for all bailliages o f m etropolitan France
having rural parishes (as in Chapters 5 and 6 ).63 T he literacy variables,
exceptionally, have som e m issing data.
The Misery Thesis

L et us now consider the plausible proposals for the roots o f the rural
upheaval. T he sh eer level o f m isery in 1789 has always received attention.
C . E . Labrousse’s path-breaking w ork646 5on the econom ic structure o f the
Old Regim e set forth a particularly cogen t version o f this thesis. Labrousse
presents a theoretical m odel and m uch em pirical evidence for the central
role o f cereal prices in the econom y o f the Old Regim e. Labrousse contended
that in an econom y o f the “ old ty p e,” a con cept he m agnificently elaborated,
food prices w ere the key to popular w ell-being. W hen food p rices rose, for
exam ple, the erosion o f disposable incom e m eant the collapse o f industrial
production. Artisans in urban w orkshops and rural producers in cottages
w ere alike in their loss o f livelihood. M oreover, Labrousse urges, since
grains w ere the m ajor item in diet and since other grain prices varied in
tandem w ith the price o f w heat,66 w e may take the reasonably good price
series for w heat as a m easure o f aggregate m isery. A s for the Revolution
62. The statistical tests used were Fisher’s Exact That (two-tailed) when the numbers were very
«mal and chi-square corrected for continuity (two-tailed) otherwise.
63. See above, Chapter 5. Some of the data were initially coded by baiUiage. Other series were
recorded for the postrevohitionary départements; in these latter cases, baiUiage approximations
were computed; seeJohnMarkoffand Gilbert Shapiro, “The Linkage of Data Describing Overlapping
Geographical Units,” Historical Methods Newsletter 7 (1973): 34-66. For the price data, bailliages
were assigned the value of the généralité in which they are located.
64. Cam3le-Eme8t Labrousse, Esquisse du mouvement des prix et des revenus en France au
XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Librairie Dalloz, 1933).
65. If wheat prices rose, people shifted to rye, driving up that price as well—and so on for even
less desirable grains. For data on the similar price trajectories of various cereal grains, see
Labrousse, Equisse.
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Table 7.8. Forms of Rural Mobilization by Social Contexts, July 1789-August 1789 (% ofBailliages with Particular Forms)
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S 5
in particular, Labrousse lays great w eight on the im m ediate econom ic

circum stances: the conjoncture.*6
It is certainly notew orthy that want does not seem strongly linked to any
form o f m obilization apart from the G reat Fear (see the last tw o row s in
Table 7 .8 ).6
67 E ven the relationship w ith conflict over food supply is rather
6
w eak. H unger or the fear o f hunger may have nurtured the G reat Fear; it
d oes not seem a potent sou rce o f the attacks on the central human
institutions o f m aterial exactions: the lord, the church, the state. On the
other hand, price rises m ight have raised local fears o f raids on ripening
grain, thereby setting an anxious stage for talk o f nonexistent raids in
late July.6*
W hat m ight be rather m ore surprising to som e students o f revolts are the
associations o f increases in the price o f w heat or rather the lack o f such
associations. The view that sheer m isery accounts for social upheaval has
often been challenged as hopelessly naive. A variety o f alternate proposals
have been put forw ard that share the notion that past experience provides a
basis for future expectations.69 In this view , what w e should exam ine is not
so m uch difficult straits as deteriorating circum stances. This line o f thought
suggests attention not so much— perhaps, not at all— to prices in 1789, but
rather to price in creases.70 The evidence gives absolutely no support to this
66. Data on wheat prices from 1756 to 1790 are presented in Labrousse (Espnsse, 106-13).
The data were initially collected by the Bureau des Subsistances on a semiweekly or weekly basis
for a county-size administrative district, the subdélégation. These data formed the basis for the
computation of unweighted means for the larger généralité, the basic administrative division of the
Old Regime; Labrousse presents a table of annual généralité averages dredged out of the archives
in the course of the Convention’s debates on food polides in 1792. Although the bailliage is a much
smaller unit, I assigned a bailliage the mean price for its généralité. This is probably not a serious
distortion, for Labrousse has shown that nearby areas had very similar price trajectories (no doubt
a consequence of the extent of market integration). Restriction to annual means, however, is
unfortunate; the best measure of the hardship of the summer of 1789 would use a seasonal, not an
annual, figure. See Labrousse’s painstaking evaluation of the quality of the data (JEsquisse, 16-85).
A few details: I ignore the data Labrousse’s source gives for ‘‘Bayonne,’’ which was not a
généralité, and which was administratively reassigned several times in various reorganizations of the
administrative structure of the Southwest; I assume that “Hainaut” refers to the généralité of
Valenciennes, including Cambrésis as well as Hainaut; I treat "Lyon and Dombes” as if it describes
the généralité of Lyon alone of which Dombes was not a part.
67. Since most rural people experienced want much of the time, a more precise, if cumbersome
formulation would be that variations in the level of misery as indicated by prices do not seem to
explain much of the variation in the outbreak of open conflict
68. It is worth noting that fears over scarcity are assigned great importance in Gay Ramsay’s
recent study of the Great Fear around Soissons (Ramsay, Ideology ofthe GreatFear, 3-51).
69. See Davies, "J-curve," Gurr, Why Men Rebel; Feieraband and Feierhand, "Aggressive Be
havior.”
70. Charles Tilly, “Reflections on the Revolutions of Paris: An Essay on Recent Historical
Writing,” Social Problems 12 (1964): 99-121, for a critique of the “misery thesis”; see also David
Snyder and Charles Tilly, "Hardship and Collective Violence in France, 1830-1960,” American
SociologicalReview (1972): 520-32.
view . On the contrary, the only significant relationship o f price increase and
m obilization is actually negative.71 W hat appears to be happening is that the
largest price increases are in th ose areas o f generally low er p rices, w hich
rem ain relatively low in 1789. T he level o f shortage rather than its contrast
with som e prior state seem s to be what accounts for such im pact as there is.
Involvement in Markets and Struggles over Food Supply

T he price o f grain d oes not even have a statistically significant effect in
directing m obilization tow ard securing food. This is strikingly consistent
with Louise T illy’s observations o f other w aves o f subsistence even ts.72 She
suggested that it w as not so m uch starvation as it w as the actual possibility
o f relief in the face o f shortages that triggered food riots. Starving peasants,
with no food in sight, one may suggest grim ly, starve; but hungry peasants
through w hose parish passes a grain convoy may w ell attack it This is
borne out by Table 7 .8 . Exam ine the conditions associated with subsistence
even ts. T h e m ajor roads w hose length and number of intersections w ere
counted w ere traveled by the convoys. T he grain, o f foreign or French
origin, required arm ed guards to escort it to its intended destination, the
m ajor tow ns (a presen ce likew ise strongly associated w ith subsistence
even ts).
N ote also that grain-producing regions are likew ise riot-produdng on es.
Bailliages with m uch arable land, or relatively prosperous and cereai-
produdng openfield farm s, are prone to subsistence even ts; w hereas dis
tricts w ith significant w ine production or extensive stock-raising (indicated
by grassland), with considerable wasteland, covered with forests or in the
plains south and w est o f the openfield country are notably deficient in such
disturbances. If local visibility o f grain is critical for subsistence even ts, (m e
m ight also exp ect subsistence events to be associated with high yields o f
w heat and rye. T he association with rye d oes appear, but the effect o f high
w heat yields, if any, is not statistically significant T he absence o f a
significant relationship w ith w heat yields is the one elem ent in the data not
consistent with the general picture. In short, the areas tom by food riots
are those in which there w as food— because grain w as shipped there,
through there, or from there.
71. The particular measure of price increase was the percentage by which the price of wheat had
increased in 1789 over its lowest value since 1784. I experimented with other price-increase
measures selected on the basis of plausible reference points for contrasting the miserable present
with a less miserable remembered past, which is the psychological mechanism invoked in much of
the literature. The relationships differ in size but generally show the same negative sign as the one
presented here.
72. Louise A. THy, "The Food Riot as a Form oí Political Conflict in France," Journal of
InlenhsciplmaryHistory 2 (1972): 23-57.
Som e com m unities m ight be m ore sensitive to food supply issues than
oth ers. Tw o decades o f research on English food riots suggests that in the
countryside it was those w ho w orked in rural industry w ho w ere especially
sensitive to the m arket and hence especially prone to engage in collective
action .73 A grow ing w estern involvem ent in rural textile production, esp e
cially in Norm andy, saw many fam ilies with a m em ber or tw o involved in
cottage industries. Part-tim e peasants, with som e w eaving in the off-season ,
had been shifting into full-tim e manufacturing and w ere struck a double blow
in the econom ic crises o f the 1780s. In one o f the Old R egim e's rare
trium phs for th ose w ho would radically dism antle state controls o f econom ic
life, the com m ercial treaty o f 1786 with Britain opened the French m arket
to British textiles, taking effect the follow ing year.74 Rural purchasing pow er
w as alm ost at on ce dealt an even m ore devastating blow in the form o f
m iserable harvests at the end o f the 1780s. This catastrophe com pleted the
shutting dow n o f textile m anufacture in northw estern France, with especially
difficult consequences in Norm andy. A t the sam e tim e as em ploym ent fell,
food p rices skyrocketed in a Norman countryside increasingly populated by
ex-peasants cut o ff from w hatever protection m ight still be alive in agricul
tural com m unities.75 Perhaps the special affinity erf Norm andy and subsis
ten ce even ts76 is thereby explained.
Finally, w e note that regions characterized by administrative centralization
are also prone to subsistence disturbance. L et us consider that variable’s
im port for con flicts over food supply in coqjunctkm w ith the expansion o f the
national state and the national m arket
State, Market, and Insurrection in Summer 1789

Tocqueville’s is the classic argum ent to the effect that the Revolution w as
the culm ination o f a centuries-long struggle o f the central authority against
73. John Bohstedt, "The Moral Economy and the Discipline of Historical Context,” Journal of
SocialHistory 26 (1992): 265-84.
74. J. F. Bosher argues that this treaty was far less of a significant factor in the economic
hardship than was believed at the time, but even in this view the treaty came to be an emblem of
an uncaring state, wholly failing in its responsibilities to provide. See J. F. Bosher, The Single Duty
Project: A Study of the Movementfor a French Customs Union m the Eighteenth Century (London:
Athlone, 1969), 82-83.
75. On the social transformation of the countryside around Rouen, see William Reddy, The Rise
of Market Culture: The Textile Thule and French Society, 1750-1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1984); and Gay GuDickson, The Spinners and Weavers ofAujfay: Rural Industry
and the SexualDivision ofLaborin a French Village, 1750-1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1986).
76. See above, Table 7.4. Cynthia Bouton’s work shows Normandy to be the region most prone
to subsistence disturbances throughout most of the history of this form of conflict from the late
seventeenth century into the early nineteenth, which suggests a specific regional culture of revolt
even more than it does a consistent outcome of environment on forms of conflict. See Cynthia
w ielders o f autonom ous pow er. A s the increasingly bureaucratized agencies

o f the Crow n seized con trol o f road building, taxation, and policing, as they
acquired the capacity to raise and equip a centrally controlled m ilitary
apparatus, as they nibbled away at the political and judicial authority o f the
lords, they destroyed the m oral basis for w hatever legitim acy local elites
m ight on ce have p ossessed . T he lords no longer had duties, and their
privileges w ere thereby rendered intolerable. To pay seigneurial dues to
som eone w ho in turn provided m ilitary defen se, p oor relief, a ccess to
m arkets, m aintenance o f roads, and police activity had been one thing; for
Tocqueville, the m ilitary and political erosion o f the lord’s role turned a
servant o f the com m on good into a legalized thief. B y the late eighteenth
century, the expansion o f central authority had not only deprived the locally
dom inant strata o f their ow n coerciv e resou rces but had rem oved from them
as w ell any m oral claim s to the allegiance o f the countryside. T he local lords
w ere now entirely dependent on the state; when the judicial and m ilitary
structures o f that central authority foundered in the political crisis o f 1789,
the peasants threw o ff the vestiges o f a local social w orld w hose vitality had
been sapped by the P aris-centered bureaucracy.
Sasha Weitman’s*777 8exploration o f Tocqueville’s thesis suggests on e w ay
to m easure the differential extent o f central con trol A bout one-third o f
France still had functioning provincial estates in which many public functions
w ere carried out by regional authorities. Although these areas, the /xarys
détats, differed a good deal from one another in the extent o f provincial self-
rule, as w ell as in the com position o f their Provincial E states, they all
retained som e m easure o f autonom y. T he pays d’élections, on the other
hand, had an adm inistrative structure dom inated by a centrally appointed
bureaucrat The hypothesis to be exam ined h ere, then, is that the rural
upheaval w as nurtured by the pressures o f the central adm inistration, felt
m ost heavily in the pays délections.n
Bouton, "Region and Regionalism: The Case of France,” paper presented to the 1994 meetings of
the American Historical Association, San Francisco.
77. Sasha Weitman, "Bureaucracy, Democracy and the French Revolution” (Ph.D. diss., Wash
ington University, 1968).
78. For a few ambiguous cases my pays ¿¿tats/pays ¿¿lections classification followed that of
Weitman with one exception. He classifies as pays ¿¿tats several regions which property speaking
lacked Provincial Estates: Metz, Lorraine, and Alsace. These provinces—known aspays conquis or
pays ¿impositions—were relatively recent acquisitions of the French Crown and lacked the
identifying institutions of both Estates and ¿lections. I follow his argument that these regions
preserved many of their forms of self-government and are therefore more likepays ¿¿tats thanpays
¿¿lections for the purposes of the present analysis (see Weitman, “Bureaucracy, Democracy and
the French Revolution,” 445). But I did not classify Dauphiné among the pays ¿¿tats, since its
Provincial Estates were explicitly abolished in 1628. The defiant convocation of the Provincial
Estates there in 1788 was a significant act in the movement toward revolution. On the other hand,
although Provence also had its Provincial Estates suspended from 1639 to the crisis, it retained a
rather differently constituted provincial administration under a different name. For a survey of the
Table 7 .8 suggests a m ixed evaluation o f this hypothesis. On the on e

hand, anti-tax even ts, subsistence events, and the G reat Fear are indeed
m ore com m on in the regions w here the hand o f Paris fell m ost heavily. In
the specific instance o f disturbances over food , to return to this very
im portant arena o f con flict, this is especially easy to understand. T h e
governm ent’s involvem ent in provisioning undoubtedly m ade the govern
m ent a plausible target in the event o f shortages. Louise Tilly has rather
effectively show n the sen se in which the food riots o f the eighteenth century
m ay even be seen as m ovem ents o f resistance against the increasing
authority o f the central state apparatus.79 M ore recently, the leading scholar
o f the governm ent’s provisioning policy has m ade a strong case that the
very attem pts o f the governm ent to intervene in the econom y to avoid
the likelihood o f the dangerous social disorders that often follow ed in the
wake o f shortages w ere them selves a sou rce o f the w idespread belief that
the governm ent itself w as part and parcel o f a plot by holders o f grain to
enrich them selves at the expense o f the people— a cast o f mind he calls “ the
famine plot persuasion. ”80 In this light, it is not surprising that social
disturbances over food w ere m ore probable w here the hand o f the state w as
m ost visible.
T he G reat Fear, too, is m arkedly m ore com m on in the pays d’élections. In
the occu rren ce o f those panics, perhaps w e can see the consequences o f a
general loss o f reassurance in the capacities o f authority to provide: In the
crisis o f 1789 the national authorities w ere d early lacking; and, if w e
follow T ocqueville, to the extent that Parisian tutelage had supplanted o r
underm ined either the sen se o f responsibility o f or the deferen ce due to the
locally dominant strata, there is little w onder at the upsurge o f this m ost
spectacular form o f local action in self-defen se im provised from below . A t
least, follow ing Tocqueville again, one may conjecture that publicly active
Provincial E states provided som e sen se o f reassurance that som eone up
there m ight know what to do. G eorges L efebvre has m ade the analogous
suggestion that the relative freedom o f Brittany from the G reat Fear w as
due to the perceived efficacy o f the municipal authorities, an efficacy
dem onstrated not so m uch in avoiding as in actively making the municipal
revolution.81
evolution of the powers of the various Provincial-Estates, see Maurice Bordes, L’administration
provinciale et municipale en France au XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Société (l'Edition dTEnseignement
Supérieur, 1972), 60-115.
79. ‘‘The Food Riot as Political Conflict”
80. S. L Kaplan, The Famine Plot Persuasion in Eighteenth-Century France (Phüadefrhia:
American Philosophical Society, 1982).
81. La Grande Peur de 1789 (Paris: Armand Cohn, 1970), 182. Lynn Hunt, however, doubts any
relation of munripal revolution and Great Fear; see her “Committees and Communes: Local Politics
and National Revolution in 1789,” Comparative Studies in Society andHistory 18 (1976): 333.
On the oth er hand, it is equally striking that the data appear to indicate
that direct attacks on the representatives o f the m ajor social institutions o f
the Old Regim e w ere no m ore likely in the pays d’élections than in the
Pays d états— apart from the case o f governm ental institutions them selves,
specifically in the form o f anti-tax re v o lt If w e read T ocqu eville's thesis not
as asserting a general social m alaise as the consequence o f central bureau
cratic encroachm ents upon traditional institutions, but rather as insisting
upon a rather specific underm ining o f the legitim acy o f the position o f the
local lords, w e m ust admit that w e see no evidence in the actions o f the
peasants in 1789. In the pays délections there is no special tendency to attack
seigneurial institutions. A s for invasions o f m onasteries and manhandling o f
bishops, such even ts w ere actually m ore characteristic o f the pays d états. I
offer tentatively the speculation that this latter occu ren ce m ay arise from
the unusually heavy w eight o f the tithe relative to oth er m aterial burdens in
the extensive southern provinces o f P rovence and Languedoc that w ere
endow ed with Provincial E states or the equivalent
If w e consider the paym ents due the tax authorities rather than the
dem ands o f lord o r church, how ever, as w e have ju st noted, the picture
changes. T h ere is a small but significant tendency for anti-tax actions to be
m ore com m on in the pays délections. Perhaps this is nothing m ore than a
consequence o f the greater general taxation level that prevailed w here
Provincial E states did not function to m itigate som ew hat the insatiable
cravings o f the tax system . But w e m ay recall that rather than a diffuse anti
tax m obilization throughout highly taxed regions, w e w ere able to show
above that anti-tax actions early in the Revolution clustered along the
boundaries o f very different taxed provinces (see pp. 3 4 8 -5 1 ). Thus it is
not the w eight o f taxes as such that explains the location o f revolt, but
either the resentm ents or the organization bom o f resentm ent and opportu
nity w here low and high taxes are found together. (Is this w hy the difference
in anti-tax even ts betw een the pays d états and pays délections is not m uch
greater than it is?)82
W hatever it w as that im pelled peasants to attack ecclesiastical institutions
in the pays d états and tax institutions in the pays délections, there is no
significant effect o f the heaviness o f the hand o f the state on antiseigneurial
risings,83 not, at any rate, in the sum m er o f 1789. If any Tocquevillean
82. It would be interesting to see whether areas of Languedoc or Provence with amalar tithe
levels but different traditions of resistance are different in anti-tithe actions in 1789, but the
microvariability of tithe assessments and the invisibility oí much of the resistance makes an analysts
that parallels the tax analysis here very difficult and I have not attempted it
83. Since anti-tithe and anti-tax actions are so interestingly associated with the weight of tithes
and taxation at the crisis point in the summer of 1789, it is unfortunate that the measurement of the
weight of the seigneuriafism proved recalcitrant It is difficult to summarize the available research
on a national scale. There are too manydifferent sorts of seigneurial rights, some of whichparticular
p rocess w as discrediting the lords, it d oes not seem m ore m arked, that
sum m er, in the specific locales o f greatest state direction.
From the state, w e turn to the m arket. T he presen ce o f tow ns and roads
d oes m ore than nurture subsistence even ts. T he m ost consistently strong
relationships for all form s o f m obilization are with d ty size84 and road
length.85 T he propensity to rural m obilization o f the bailliages with d ty size
above the m edian is double (o r m ore) that o f those below for every type o f
even t; the im pact o f road length is alm ost as m arked. C ity size, like length
o f m ajor roads, is a strong indication o f m arket involvem ent T he grow ing
tow ns o f the eighteenth century w ere transform ing rural life. Urban dem and
for food , dothing, fuel, and building m aterials had repercussion s in the
countryside. Food production w as geared tow ard urban m arkets;86 m er
chants turned from the urban guilds to an unorganized rural labor force
w hose agricultural incom e, m oreover, facilitated low er w ages;87 and values
rose, as urbanites sought land for com m ercial profit or for the prestige
associated w ith “ living n obly,“ as the eighteenth-century expression had it,
historians may attempt to measure in particular regions—if they have the documents; there is great
variability from one seigneurie to another in the same province, or even one household to another
in the same seigneurie; large areas with little relevant research (such as Alsace); large areas with
very contradictory claims in the existing research (such as Brittany). It is surely the most important
missing element in the analysis presented in this chapter.
84. City Size: The most complete list of dty populations is “Populations des viles suivant les
états envoyés par Messieurs les intendants de Province, années 1787-1789. Eléments ayant servi
à la formation des Etats de Population du Royaume de France” (Archives Nationales, Série Div bis,
Dossier 47). A second source, identical to the Etats de Population for those dries on both lists, is
Ministère des TYavaux Publics, de l'Agriculture et du Commerce, Statistique de la France (Paris:
Imprimerie Royale, 1837). The population of several other towns or cities may be found in Gérard
Walter, Répertoire de rhistoire de la Révolution française (travaux publics de 1800 à 1940), voL 2,
Lieux (Paris: Bibliothèque Nationale, 1951). For urban places of known location that do not appear
in these sources, it was assumed that any estimate was better than an implicit assumption of zero
population. Such places were assigned the meanvalue of those cases located in Walter but not given
in either of the first two sources (taking the Walter group as representative of smaller places).
City Location: Brette’s maps were used to locate towns in bailliages. The following works also
helped in this: Beatrice F. Hyslop, Répertoire critique des cahiers de doléancespour les étatsgénéraux
de 1789 (Paris: Ministère de l'Education Nationale, 1933) and Supplément au répertoire critique des
cahiers de doléances pour les états généraux de 1789 (Paris: Ministère de l’Education Nationale,
1952); Paul Joanne, Dictûmnain géographique et administratifde la France et de ses colonies (Paris:
Hachette, 1890); and Ludovic Lalanne, Dictionnaire historique de la France (Geneva: Statkine-
Megariotis Reprints, 1977).
85. Length of major road and number of intersections were coded from a map of routes postales
from the Year Five reproduced in Pierre Vidal de la Blache, Tbbleau de la géographie de la France
(Paris: Hachette, 1911), 379. A photographic enlargement was overlaid with a transparency with
bailliage outlines and the length of the road was measured in arbitrary units.
86. Steven L. Kaplan, ProvisioningParis (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984).
87. Peter Kriedte, Hans Medidt, andJdrgen Schlumbohm, Industrialization Before Industrializa
tion: Rural Industry m the Genesis of Capitalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1981), 13-23.
now that com m ercial profits w ere already m ade. T h ese transform ations
w ere experienced as pressures on rural com m unities as the pow erful
attem pted to expand their holdings.
T he lords had a variety o f m echanism s at their disposal for responding to
m arket opportunities. T he seigneurial rights could be utilized not m erely to
increase the lord s' revenues, but to force the peasants to sell. O bscure
claim s could be revived or invented with the advice o f a class o f legal
specialists; arrears could be allow ed to pile up in ord er to dem and an
unpayable sum ; the right o f option could be em ployed to com pel a seller o f
land to seD to the lord .88
If th ese m arket-oriented regions w ere socially explosive it w as because
they w ere the location not o f one particular conflict, but o f many. Peasant
com m unities attem pted to defend them selves from profit-seeking secular
lords and landholding m onasteries; the hungry confronted the adm inistrators
o f the urban-oriented grain supply system ; form er agriculturalists w ho had
shifted into the grow ing rural industries had interests that w ere very
different from th ose o f prosperous peasants w ho produced a surplus;
scarcities set the threatened inhabitants o f the countryside against the
threatened inhabitants o f the tow ns. E xacerbated by severe hardship and
the breakdow n o f authority, these m ultiple tensions bred not on e, but many
form s o f collective m obilization.
Table 7 .8 dem onstrates the great significance o f econom ic integration into
larger structures. The m ost consistently efficacious prom oters o f the several
form s o f rural upheaval appear to be a large nearby tow n and a stretch o f
good road. Road length is the only variable in the entire table associated with
all form s o f con flict A great deal passes over those roads o f consequences to
the country people. On those roads and near those tow ns m arket depen
dence had eroded anything resem bling subsistence production; hard tim es
w ere potential catastrophes. To return to our discussion o f food supply:
larger tow n size is notew orthy for the generation o f subsistence even ts. Is
this not a clear outcom e o f a provisioning apparatus in which the police
authorities o f larger tow ns dom inated and w ere seen to dom inate over their
lesser satellites? To the extent that crow ds set upon the m illers, bakers,
m erchants, or officials concerned with provisioning, they did so m ore reliably
the m ore that tow n w as seen as accum ulating stores w hile the people
starved (o r w as even seen to be conspiring deliberately to profit from
hunger).
T h e G reat Fear, too, is extrem ely sensitive to a stretch o f good road in
the vicinity. D o w e see here, perhaps, the significance o f the road netw ork
in the oral transm ission o f rum or, as beautifully argued in L efebvre’s classic
88. Pierre de SaintJacob documented the extent of such practices in northern Burgundy.
account?89 T he governm ent's road-building policy may have aim ed at uniting

a m odernizing France; in 1789 it provided the m eans for a rapid nationw ide
diffusion o f often archaic fears. A s for the role o f the tow ns in the G reat
F ear Apart from the general state o f social vulnerability that integration into
distant m arkets m ay have afforded,90 the G reat Fear w as, in part, a reaction
to the very real form s o f urban m obilization sim ultaneously occurring on an
extrem ely w ide scale. Both urban insurrections and the rapid proliferation
o f p ro- and anti-insurrectionary urban militias aroused fears in the country
side w ith a definite grounding in bitter realities. A s a rather om inous
indicator o f one possible direction o f urban-rural relations, the royal troops—
w ho w ere likely to mutiny when ordered to fire upon the politicized
crow ds o f the tow ns— w ere quite reliable in responding to rural unrest with
disciplined brutality.91
Literacy
T he p resen ce o f tow ns or roads may indicate som ething besides the
pressures o f the m arketplace. B y virtue o f integration into com m ercial
netw orks, the people o f the French countryside m ay have becom e infused
w ith values and ideas that w ere bom in the urban cen ters as welL In
particular, w e m ight w onder w hether rural com m unities penetrated by the
m arket m ight also be influenced by the thinking o f the eighteenth century’s
many social critics. From a m ethodological point o f view , if our indicators o f
m arket involvem ent had to do double duty as a m easure o f a possible
intellectual shift as w ell, w e would find the interpretation o f our data
rather am biguous. Perhaps the association o f tow ns and roads w ith rural
insurrection derives not so m uch from the m arketplace as such but from the
diffusion o f urban ideas.
L et us now consider literacy. If tow ns and roads increased the pressures
o f the m arketplace, did they not also increase the access o f the countryside
to the critical thought o f the eighteenth century? In the vicinity o f the cities
and along the m ore accessible transportation arteries, w ere not the peasants
m ore o f a target in the struggle for the hearts and minds o f the French that
was w aged with such energy by the pam phleteers in the w eeks and m onths
that proceeded the election s? Perhaps so, but rather than restrict ou rselves
to the physical accessibility o f critical thought, w e may m ore pointedly
89. Lefebvre, GrandePeur.

90. Yoichi Uriu has recently shown that in Dauphiné the Great Fear took place among villages
connected to one another through the same market town. See Yoichi Uriu, “Espace et Révolution:
enquête, Grande Peur et fédérations,’’ Annales Historiques de la Révolution Française 62 (1990):
150-66.
91. Samuel F. Scott, The Response of the Royal Army to the French Revolution: The Role and
Development oftheArmy, 1789-1793 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978), 79.
exam ine intellectual accessibility, nam ely, literacy. We take as m easures o f

literacy the proportion o f m en and o f w om en signing their m arriage docu
m ents betw een 1786 and 1790.929 3
The developm ent o f literacy has rather frequently been credited w ith
raising the insurrectionary poten tial'of the socially subordinate. We m ay take
as an instance Law rence Stone’s com m ents on the political significance o f
access to w ritten com m unication: “ Literate people are far harder to govern
and exploit than illiterates.’’913 Sterne goes on to note the striking fact that
the great revolutions o f England, France, and Russia took ¡dace at m om ents
when the proportion o f m en w ho w ere in som e sen se literate w as betw een
one-third and tw o-thirds (138). He suggests that rising literacy carries with
it a developing im patience w ith the existing order.
But Table 7 .8 d oes not reveal a pattern o f free-floating alienation that
m ight underlie any form o f m ovem ent indiscrim inately; nor d oes it show that
m ore literate areas had a higher organizational capacity to act, how ever they
defined the purposes o f their action. Only anti-tax actions w ere especially
characteristic o f the literate countryside. W hat em erges clearly is that the
main consequence o f literacy that sum m er w as to ward o ff the G reat Fear.94
It is as if the politics o f m istaken rum or w ere w eakened by the presen ce o f
people w ith access to the w ritten w ord or with intellectual habits form ed by
contact w ith docum ents.
92. These data were gathered in a nationwide study begun in 1877 by Louis Maggiolo. There
has been some controversy over the interpretation of signatures as a measure of literacy and over
Maggioio’s data in particular; recent work that evaluates this data, however, suggests its validity as
an indicator of regional variations. See Michel Fleury and Pierre %hnary, “Les progrès de
l’instruction élémentaire de Louis XIV àNapoléonIDd’après l’enquête de L Maggioio (1877-1879),”
fíjpulation 12 (1957): 71-92; James HoudaiDe, “Les signatures au mariage de 1740 à 1829,”
Djpulation 32 (1977): 65-90; Michel lfovede, “Y a-t-il eu une révolution culturelle au XVŒe siècle?
A propos de l’éducation populaire en Provence,” in Michel VbveDe, De ht cave au grenier: Un
itinéraire en Provence auXVllle siècle. De ¡"histoire sociale à rhistoire des mentalités (Quebec Serge
Fleury, 1980), 313-67; and François Furet andJacques Ozouf, Lire et écrire: L'alphabétisation des
français de Calvin à Jules Ferry (Paris: Les Editions de Minuit, 1977). The actual data are to be
found in Ministère de l’Instruction Publique, Statistique de l’instruction primaire (Paris: Imprimerie
Nationale, 1880), 2:156-73. Since Maggioio’s data are by département, bailliage literacy values must
be estimated. This is done by weighting the literacy rates for the départements that intersect a
bailliage by the proportion of the bailliage’s area contained in those départements. Several départe
ments lack data. Départements with missing data simply do not contribute to the estimated rates for
those bailliages that they intersect. A bailliage is treated as a missing case only if its entire area lies
in one or more départements with missing data. See Markoff and Shapiro, “Linkage of Data.”
93. Lawrence Stone, "Literacy and Education in England, 1640-1900,” Dot and Present 2
(1969): 84-85.
94. This is the finding that differs most from earlier results reported inJohn Markoff, “Literacy
and Revolt” In that article I treated the spring and summer of 1789 together, did not look beyond
that summer, and thought my data showed not only a dampening effect of literacy on panicky
reactions to fantasized enemies, but a channeling of mobilization against seigneurial targets as weL
The latter, the present analysis makes clear, characterizes only a very early point in the unfolding
of the Revolution; as a characterization of the breakthrough summer, it was erroneous (see p. 398).
Forms of Solidarity: Communal Ties and the Propensity to Revolt

And now let us consider the long-enduring structures that disposed people
to act in particular w ays and bent collective action in particular directions.
T he organizational capacity o f rural people has been a classical con cern o f
political sociology since Karl M arx vividly contrasted the am orphousness o f
sm allholding peasants with the consciousness o f m odem factory w orkers in
The 18th Brumaire. For M arx, the people w ho lived and w orked on what he
saw as separate and largely self-contained fam ily farm s in m id-nineteenth-
century France constituted a revealing instance o f a group unable to
appreciate, define, or act upon a sen se o f shared interest: the w orklives o f
these farm fam ilies did not bring them together but divided them .9 96 Several
5
Am erican sociologists have recently brought such considerations to the
exploration o f the French rural com m unities in the Revolution. Theda
Skocpol has found in the late eighteenth-century countryside the conditions
for autonom ous revolutionary action, independent o f urban leadership; the
countryside is both a central actor in the destruction o f the Old Regim e and
a m ajor problem for the Parisian-based task o f political recon stru ction .96 If
the capacity o f the countryside to m obilize itself is seen by Skocpol as a
central facet o f revolution, Arthur Stinchcom be has argued that the condi
tions she holds to favor autonom ous peasant action only existed in northern
F rance.9798H ere Stinchcom be draws on a long and distinguished tradition erf
French historical geography. E ver since André Siegfried contended that the
political conservatism o f w estern France w as rooted in its geographical
distinctiveness,96 the scholarly dissection o f France’s distinctive agrarian
societies has flourished.
D oes the structure o f the local com m unity affect the form s o f revolt?
M any scholars think so, but what is the relevant “ stru ctu re'? For som e, in
a tradition that w e m ight very approxim ately call “ M arxian," the forging o f
local solidarities is grounded in the w ork patterns o f everyday life in w hich
w resting a livelihood in the struggle against nature on the one hand and the
struggle against the claim s o f the dominant classes on the other forg es
patterns o f cooperation in w ork and in political struggle alike. This line o f
thinking em erges in recen t sociological reflection on a body o f w ork in
French historical geography very pow erfully developed by M arc B loch and
95. For the classic passage, see Karl Marx, “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte,” in
Karl Marx and Frederic Engels, Selected Works (Moscow; Foreign Languages Publishing House,
1955), 1:334-35. In the essay taken as a whole, Marx is at pains to contrast the world of these
smallholders not only with that of factory workers but with other ways of rural life.
96. Theda Skocpol, States andSocial Revolutions: A ComparativeAnalysis ofFrance, Russia and
China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 118-26.
97. Arthur Stinchcombe, EconomicSociology (New York: Academic Press, 1983), 46-64.
98. André Siegfried, Tableaupolitique de la France de tOuest sous la ThksümeRépublique (Paris:
Armand Cohn, 1964).
R oger D ion. A secon d tradition looks to juridical definitions o f com m unity

and autonom y and asks what responsibilities rem ained in village hands
despite the grow ing seizure o f pow er by the central state and its sem ibu-
reaucratic agents in the provinces. W e m ight call this secon d tradition, even
m ore approxim ately than the first, “ Tocquevillean,” in recognition o f the
w eight in that thinker’s analyses that is played by the extent and social
location o f regions o f autonom y from state pow er. H istorians in this tradition
are apt to consider the juridical responsibilities o f com m unities, their rights
to adm inister them selves (for exam ple, to allocate taxes internally) and their
capacities to engage in legally accepted collective action (for exam ple, to
file law suits). T he first tradition looks to solidarities rooted in econom ic
interdependencies in northern and eastern France; the secon d to solidarities
rooted in juridically recognized autonom y and traditional com munal responsi
bility in the south and especially along the M editerranean coast o f P rovence
and L an gu edoc99
Since econom ic structures and political autonom y differed so m uch am ong
F ran ce's regions, both accounts have a certain inherent plausibility. C er
tainly, the rhythm s and routines o f social life differed considerably across
the French countryside. C ereal production in the northern plains w as carried
out in a social con text that contrasted m arkedly with the polyculture o f the
M editerranean coastal area, the w ine-producing Southw est, o r the desper
ate expedients o f the im poverished M assif Central. And there has been
especially great scholarly interest in the w estern pattern o f dispersed
farm steads that shaped a w ay o f life and w hose Sunday gathering at
church m ade the political com m unity virtually indistinguishable from the
ecclesiastical parish. What is needed is a basis for distinguishing on a
broad regional basis am ong what G oubert has called “ tw enty contrasting
peasantries.” 100
C onsider first the nature o f production. Anyone at all fam iliar w ith France
is likely to think at on ce o f the openfield agriculture o f the N orth and E a st
T he structure o f econom ic activity and the pattem o f settlem ent in this
relatively prosperous grain-producing region w ere inseparable from a dense
w eb o f social relation s.101 C ollectively negotiated com munal self-regulation
w as part and parcel o f the everyday activities o f productive life. T he village
w as surrounded by the holdings o f its m em bers, unfenced and interm ingled.
99. Among recent writers, Michel \bveOe, whom many would usually associate with Marxians,
turns up, on this matter, in the Tocquevillean camp.
100. Pierre Goubert, “Sociétés rurales françaises du 18e siècle: Vingt paysanneries contrastées.
Quelques problèmes,” in Pierre Goubert, ed., Clio parmi les hommes: Recueil tfarticles (Paris and
the Hague: Mouton, 1976), 63-74.
101. Marc Bloch, Les caractères originaux de Tkistoire rurale française (Paris: Armand Cobn,
1968); Roger Dion, Essaisur laformation dupaysage ruralfrançais (NeuiDy-Sur-Seine: Guy Durier,
1981); EtienneJinBard, La vie rurale dans la plaine deBasse-Alsace (Strasbourg: Le Roux, 1953).
N ot only w ere the thin strips into which fam ily holdings w ere divided
scattered am ong the holdings o f other fam ilies: the lord 's holdings m ight
also be m ixed in am ong the peasants’. T he unfenced and interm ingled
holdings required the developm ent o f a strong com m unity to coordinate the
productive activity and to deal with the lord. All activities required coordina
tion: the dates o f ploughing, sow ing, or harvesting; the grazing o f animals
(Xi the com m on and on the fallow ; the guarding o f crops. E ffective coordina
tion, not separation, protected com m unity m em bers’ interests from one
another;102 effective coordination w as also vital in the defen se o f m em bers’
interests against a predatory lord w ho m ight easily attem pt to enlarge his
claim s, particularly in a period o f expanded com m ercial opportunity, liv in g
in d o se proxim ity in their villages, the m em bers o f an openfield com m unity
found resp ect and security in m eeting obligations to the collectivity.
It is quite tem pting to see in this tightly interdependent com m unity a
tradition o f resistance to the lords that carries over into the drama o f 1789.
G enerations o f French geographers have developed the contrast o f openfield
and the W estern bocage103 w ith its tiny ham lets and scattered farm s, its
fields en d osed by hedges, its sunken roads with their restricted visibility,
and its physical separation o f grazing from cultivation. It would com e as no
great surprise to d iscover that such a human transform ation o f the French
landscape nurtured actions that differed deeply from those o f the northern
plains.1041
5 I do not believe that any French geographer or historian has
0
argued this case with greater im agination, clarity, and persuasiveness than
an Am erican sociologist has recently done. One can hardly fail to be
convinced by Arthur Stinchcom be’s a ccou n t106 D espite its theoretical ele
gance, how ever, the data106 suggest that this theory is m istaken.107 It is n ot
102. “The distinctive feature of the agrarian regime in le Nord, distinguishing that region fron
others in France, was the power exercised by the village community in regulating farming.” See
Hugh Prince, "Regional Contrasts in Agrarian Structures," in Hugh D. Clout, ed., Themes m the
Historical Geography qfFrance (New York: Academic Press, 1977), 141.
103. The openfieId-boat#; contrast can be overemphasized as Pierre Goubert has protested: the
communal herds that grazed on communal pastures in the bocage implied some level of communal
structure. But the variety of interfamily negotiations and communal decision-making without which
openfield fanning was inconceivable is just not matched. See Goubert, L’Ancien Régime, voL 1, La
Société (Paris: Armand Colin, 1969), 78.
104. One historian has even raised the question of whether there was a rural community at aBin
the southern Massif Central whose communities bear some resemblances to the western pattern.
While his answer is a compelling yes, such a question is far less likely in the openfield region. See
Peter M. Jones, “Parish, Seigneurie and the Community of Inhabitants in Southern Central France
During the Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries,” HastandPresent91 (1981): 74-108.
105. Stinchcombe, EconomicSociology, 46-64.
106. For the boundary of openfield fanning I follow the map of Roger Dion, derived from the
descriptions of Arthur Young: Roger Dion, Paysage rural français, 10; Arthur Ybung, Voyages en
France en 1787,1788 et 1789 (Paris: Armand Coin, 1976).
107. See the tenth row from the bottom of Table 7.8.
antiseigneurial revolts that characterize the openfiekl, but the actions o f

those going after available grain. The struggle against the lords has its ow n
ecological con text, but it w as not in this region.
T he role o f openfiekl settlem ent was actually to inhibit m obilization against
the lords. T he openfield’s reputation for solidarity rested on an analysis o f
w ork rhythm s. But there is another region som etim es noted for an intensely
organized life: the M editerranean South. Is that reputation deserved? M ichel
Vovelle seem s to think so, calling attention to the intensive southern
“ sociability,” as the French put it, that M aurice Agulhon show ed to be
characteristic o f P roven ce.1081 9In these little village republics, to borrow
0
another expression o f Agulhon’s ,100 a sem idem ocratic politics som etim es
enabled the w ell-to-do village leaderships to earn the unified support o f their
com m unities in decades o f legal struggles against the custom ary exactions
and the recen t encroachm ents o f lord and church.
It w as com m on in P rovence, for exam ple, for a council that w as at least
nom inally an elected body to have considerable financial discretion in the
m anagem ent o f communal funds, to supervise local m arkets and local
industrial production, to em ploy specialists to evaluate crop dam age due to
natural disasters, wild animals, or thieves, to maintain the local roads, to
appoint specialized officers for a variety o f purposes, to maintain legal
record s, and to apportion royal taxes and seigneurial dues am ong m em bers
o f the com m unity. Such functions, particularly the last one, gave the village
elites the habit o f negotiation with pow erful outsiders on behalf o f their
constituents, and gave them the habit o f adjudicating the internal politics o f
village life as w e ll110 This long tradition o f responsible political existen ce for
the M editerranean rural com m unity strongly indicates the experience and
resou rces for organized collective action. C ollective action to what ends? T o
w hatever ends local circum stances suggested— and local circum stances
varied a great deal in this region in which the m ix o f crops and animals
differed greatly from one area to the n ext But taking the presence erf olives or
alm onds as indicating the region’s distinct ecology, w e find that hypothesis
108. VfoveBe, La dicomerte de la politique, 148-50; Maurice Agufwn, La vie sociale en Promut
intérieure au lendemain de la Révolution (Paris: Société des Etudes Robespienistes, 1970), 202-35.
109. See La République au village: Les populations du Vor de la Révolution à la Deuxième
République (Paris: SeuO, 1979).
110. Bordes, Administration provinciale et municipale, 188-91. Jacques Godechot’s introductory
essay to a number of Annales du Midi devoted to southern setf-govemment is espedaly insistent
on the vigor of the elected councils of southern villages compared to what he regards as moribund
general assemblies in the North. The essays that follow his provide important exemplifications. See
Jacques Godechot, “Les municipalités du Midi avant et après la Révolution,” Annales du Midi 84
(1972): 363-67. For a thoughtful survey of the varieties of pre-revolutionary village government
see Jean-Pierre Gutton, La sociabilité villageoise dans rancienne France: Solidarités et voisinages du
XVIe auXVIIle siècle (Paris: Hachette, 1979).
is only successful, that sum m er, in predicting the G reat Fear (and even that
prediction only if w e are not fussy about statistical significance).111
We have sketched an im plicit debate: a theory o f solidarity rooted in w ork
rhythm s that suggests a northeastern cen ter o f political action and a th eory
o f solidarity rooted in juridical autonom y that suggests a M editerranean
cen ter. We have associated the form er w ith the name o f M arx and the latter
w ith Tocqueville. Perhaps there is a sort o f synthesis that, if it need any
ancestral totem , m ight be assigned to Durkheim . We m ay look for the
density o f social contact as indicated by the density o f human settlem en t
Em pirically both the openfield N ortheast and the M editerranean South had
nucleated villages: clusters o f dw ellings surrounded by fields, rather than
the dispersed farm steads characteristic o f the W est and m uch o f the
South-C enter.112 T he hypothesis: a critical m ass o f people, living in d o s e
continuity, develop a capadty for collective action that is not true for m ore
dispersed habitations. A s it happens, then, the Durkheiman thesis o f m oral
density points to both the N ortheast and the M editerranean South, w ell into
the nineteenth century.
T h ere is a severe m easurem ent problem here. If w e are w illing to use
data (Mi settlem ent patterns from a century after the R evolution,113 there is
a governm ent survey that indicates w here various percentages o f the
inhabitants o f a com m une lived in a central place. T he geographic distribution
o f nucleated settlem ent in 1891 show s several distinctive clu sters: a large
northeastern one (roughly the old openfield), a M editerranean coastal on e,
a sm aller Southw estern area around Bordeaux and a sm all, isolated zon e in
central France. For all the likelihood that the boundaries o f th ese zon es
differed to an unknown extent a century earlier (D id the nineteenth century’s
rural-urban m igration increase or decrease the concentration o f the rem ain
ing country p eop le?), the theoretical im portance o f this variable m akes it
w orth studying, even poorly m easured. W ere both the “ econom ic” and
“ political” hypotheses o f action-prom oting solidarity borne out, w e w ould be
tem pted by the m ore parsim onious “ m oral” hypothesis that subsum es both.
H ow ever, when w e .look at the tables, w e see that this m ore general
notion o f superior organizational resou rces accruing to particular settlem ent
patterns does not fare very w ell. The region o f nucleated villages (at least if
one is willing to use this nineteenth-century evidence as the b est available)
has no very clear relationship to revolt other than considerably reducing the
G reat Fear. Could it be that the pattern o f inform ation-diffusion in a densely
clustered village provided a reality check as one or another neighbor m ight
111. Source: Maps in Hugh Prince, “Regional Contrasts in Agrarian Structures,” and André Fei,
"Petite culture,” 142,223.
112. See maps in Dkm, Paysage ruralfrançais, 111.
113. See map mPrince, "Regional Contrasts in Agrarian Structures,” 140.
w ell have doubted the fantastic rum ors? This is surely how M arx thought
the social w ork! o f the nineteenth-century factory would facilitate rational
collective action (and what he thought m issing in large parts o f rural France
at m idcentury). W hatever the explanation, the case that settlem ent density
provides organizational resou rces for all form s o f action is hard to square
with the evidence.
W e m ay tackle the question o f the form s o f solidarity in another w ay. T he
W est is fam ous for its isolated farm steads, and som e have argued that
Sunday's religious services w ere th erefore absolutely central fo r local
solidarities. This, w e suggested above, w as likely to im part a religious
elem ent to com munal m obilizations (and w e saw above that W estern con
flicts, w ell before the great burst o f counterrevolution, did have an extra
religious fla vor).114 Parts o f the South-C enter have similar settlem ent pat
tern s.115 A re the W est and South-C enter, in fact, distinctive in having a
disproportionate share o f events launched after Sunday M ass? We can
explore differing regional propensities for Sunday to be the day o f r io t T he
clear evidence o f Table 7 .9 both confirm s and surprises. T he W est and
South-C enter are, as surm ised, prone to have a disproportionate share
o f Sunday even ts and the Southw est and Southeast also have Sunday
concentrations. But the largest Sunday concentration o f all turns out to be
the N ortheast Indeed, only the N ortheast has retained the traditional
degree o f Sunday concentration that seem s to be typical o f contestation
since the m id-seventeenth century (see Fig. 6 .7 ).
B y contrast, the rest o f northern F rance's contestation takes place any
tim e but Sunday. If w e recall (see F igs. 6 .9 [a H d ]) that Sunday concentra
tion is greater fo r som e form s o f conflict than oth ers, one sim ple explanation
com es to hand: northern France, specializing in conflicts over land and
w ages as w ell as panics, may have had the sorts o f struggles that, by
dividing the w ell-off from the destitute, did not lend them selves so w ell to
actions organized at or after the w eekly reconnection o f the w hole com m u
nity and G od. But now consider likely alternative settings for collective
sharing o f grievances and initiatives: w e have the m arketplace, the traditional
assem bly o f the com m unity, and the new organizational facilities bom o f
revolution (the National Guards and the political chibs). T he political chibs,
especially relatively early, w ere especially dense in the South, perhaps
making a contribution to reducing, but not elim inating, the centrality o f
Sunday. A s for com munal assem blies, there is considerable division in the
literature on their vitality in northern France. Is it possible that the literature
is divided because they actually varied greatly and that the N ortheast w as
114. See above, p. 363; Sutherland, Chouans, 215-18; Maurice Bordes, Administrationprovinci
ale et municipale, 188-91; Maurice Agulhon, La vie sociale en Provence, 59-61, 203-35.
115. Jones, Mitics andRuralSociety.
Ifeb le 7 .9 . Events on Sunday by Region (% )
North 10%
Northeast 31
Paris region 8
N orth-Center 15
South-Center 20
Southeast 19
Southwest 22
W est 29
Normandy 11
AD France 19
Percentage if aU days had equal numbers o f events 14
W (2,144)
‘Exdudes events if day was not known precisely.
singularly deficient in Old Regim e organizational nuclei? This w ould explain

w hy northeastern actions— and th ese, in m ost periods, w ere few — rem ained
Sunday-centered. In this hypothesis the Sunday-centered character o f w est
ern and south-central insurrection, taken in conjunction w ith those regions’
considerable insurrectionary propensities, w as a sign o f the strength o f
a religious-centered com m unity; the Sunday-centered character o f the
N ortheast, on the other hand, taken in conjunction w ith that region’s usual
relative inactivity, m ay, on the contrary, m erely indicate the w eakness o f
other organizing foci. Only com parative w ork on local com munal organization
could confirm (or refu te) this. The present evidence, then, gives us som e
thing to speculate about, but leaves fundamentally m ysterious the northeast
ern countryside’s revolution. In any event, villages seem to have been
developing a secularized style o f p rotest, shorn o f religiously perm eated
organization, a p rocess particularly advanced in m uch o f northern F ran ce.116
Land-use: Cereals, Pasturage, Viticulture, Woodlands, Waste

Having considered the role w e might have expected to be played by the
cereal-grow ing north and olive-grow ing M editerranean in fosterin g revolt in
116. The northern countryside may have been taking the lead in the disconnecting of violent
conflict from religious concerns that Claude Langlois sees as a central theme of nineteenth-century
political evolution. See Claude Langlois, "La fin des guerres de religion: La disparition de la violence
religieuse en France au 19e siècle," presented at the conference on “Violence and the Democratic
Itadition in France 1789-1914" at the University of California, Irvine, February 1994.
1789, the role o f grasslands117displayed in Table 7 .8 , is a genuine surprise.

Surrounding the cereal-produdng openfieki o f the Paris basin lies a belt o f
pasture land; no doubt such an arrangem ent enabled agriculturalists to
exchange som e o f their grain for the draft animals needed to pull their heavy
¡doughs. In the south, there is another zone o f grassland that supported
extensive herds o f sheep.
Stock-raising presented significant com m ercial opportunities as the grow
ing tow ns purchased m eat, leather, w ool, and animal fa t;118 as the m ilitary
required h orses; and perhaps as an increasingly com m ercialized agriculture
required animals for transport as w ell. N o doubt the attem pt to expand
com m ercial stock-raising conflicted seriously with other claim s, w hether
those o f marginal subsistence farm ing or o f m arket-oriented agriculture.
Som e lords, for exam ple, held or invented the right o f “ separate herd”
(troupeau à part), which exem pted their ow n livestock from communal
regulations.119 Q uite apart from their ow n personal use, lords w ere taking
to renting such a right to com m ercial livestock interests, a practice generally
forbidden by custom ary law, but often tolerated in practice by the cou rts.
For the lord this m ight be quite a rew arding proposition; for the peasants it
w as an unm itigated d isaster.120 Near the P yrenees, by w ay o f exam ple, the
lords w ere increasingly in the habit o f renting out grazing rights, in utter
disregard for traditional com munal restraints, to shepherds m oving their
h erd s.121 T he com m ercial exploitation o f such a traditional or new ly fabri
cated seigneurial right w as hardly a practice that could be justified by any
claim to som e form o f patrimonial responsibility for communal w elfare.
T h e attack cm the peasant com m unity m ight w ell follow a different route,
that o f fencing in one’s fields, and thereby breaking with the collectivity.
M arc B loch’s classic study o f the fate o f the enclosure m ovem ent before the
Revolution concludes that it was w here “ grass w as on its w ay to pushing
out grain” 122 that the balance o f social forces favored enclosure. But not, I
suggest, w ithout a residue o f tension that boiled over in the sum m er o f
1789. T he villagers involved with pasturage, Table 7 .8 show s, are less likely
117. André Fd, "Petite culture, 1750-1850," in Hugh D. Clout, ed., Themes m the Historical
Geography ofFronet (New York: Academic Press, 1977), 221-22.
118. Paris, admittedly an exceptional case, was purchasing livestock from as far away as
Limousin. See Nicole Lemaître, Un Horizon Bloqué: Ussel et la montagne limousine au XVIIe et
XVIIIe siècles (Ussel: Musée du Pays dTJssel, 1978), 109.
119. For the response to these and related issues in the cahiers, see above, p. 172.
120. Marc Bloch, French RuralHistory: An Essqy on its Basic Characteristics (Berkeley and Los
Angeles: University of California Press, 1966), 133, 225; "La lutte pour l’individualisme agraire
dans la France du XVIIIe siècle," Annales ¿Histoire Economique et Sociale 2 (1930): 366,
378,517-19.
121. Bloch, “Individualisme agraire,” 366.
122. Ibid., 532.
than oth ers to engage in subsistence action that sum m er but are notably
m ore prone to taking on the lords.
Although the data suggest that, at that m om ent, the tensions around
stock-raising w ere particularly likely to generate open antiseigneurial con
flict, it is far from obvious that stock-raising should prove to be the m ost
conflict-inducing form o f enterprise throughout the revolutionary era. A fter
all, viticulture and w oodlands had their ow n tensions. S o did the central land
use o f rural France: cereals. Jeffery Paige has show n that distinctive crop s
in the tw entieth century are em bedded in distinctive social relations w hose
conflicts engender very distinctive sorts o f social m ovem ents.123 It seem s
w orth inquiring w hether the distinctive practices o f France’s various peas
antries nurtured distinctive patterns o f re v o lt
Perhaps different sou rces o f tension played their part at different m o
m ents. W e shall consider this possibility below w hen w e look past that
dram atic sum m er. But let us pause a m om ent here to survey the sorts o f
tensions surrounding oth er uses o f the land and see w hether they join ed
grassland as a specific locale for sum m er’s battles. Central to the lives o f
rural com m unities w ere the patterns o f land use. Com m unities engaged in
the cultivation o f grapes, those with access to forests, th ose producing
grain, those with extensive uncultivated land, as w ell as th ose caring for
livestock had their ow n characteristic patterns o f cooperation and division
and w ere involved with the state and the m arket in particular w ays. The
association o f grassland and revolt in the sum m er o f 1789 is so striking, that
w e should consider the distinctive potentials for conflict in com m unities
form ed around oth er uses o f the land as w ell. T he significance o f local
production seem s w orth exploring as best w e can; it is only “ as b est w e
can” because the national data that I use here dates fr o n a governm ent
survey o f the later 1830s,124 a half-century after the revolutionary crisis.
French historians are som etim es fond o f stressing the broad continuities o f
daily life, w orkday routines, and econom ic structures across the revolution
ary period. But land-use patterns w ere not identical a half-century dow n
stream , although the geographic pattern in the locations o f m ore and less
arable, say, had probably not shifted so m uch as to invalidate the analysis
presented here o f the covariation o f that pattern and re v o lt
Was the land given over to wine production? If so, one m ight argue, the
small producers w ere doubly vulnerable to the p oor harvests on the ev e o f
the Revolution in som ething o f the sam e manner as the proletarian textile
w orkers o f rural Norm andy; while small grain-producers may have had their
123. Jeffery Paige, Agrarian Revolution: SocialMovements andExportAgriculture mthe Underde

veloped World (New York: Free Press, 1975).
124. Departmental maps of the extent of woodland, vines, arable, grassland, and wasteland are
presented in Fel, “Petite Culture,” 221-22. The data derive from a government study of 1836-38.
m arketable surplus w iped out, w ine-producers could not even fall back on
consum ing their ow n unsold ou tp u t125 M ichel V ovelle, for exam ple, suggests
that its viticulture w as one o f the roots o f the special proclivity to vid en t
upheaval in P roven ce.126 If one follow s M arcel Lachiver, m oreover, one
m ight find our w ine-producers to have their ow n special claim to solidarity.
Lachiver argues, at least for the area around Paris, that w ine-producing
fam ilies develop a pow erful bond around their ow n grape-stock that can be
transm itted through the generations. Viticultural com m unities cem ent their
sen se o f distinctiveness through such a strong culture o f m arrying both
locally and within the w ine-grow ing com m unity that petitions for the w aiver
o f the church’s marital barriers am ong close kin w ere rou tin e.127
T he presen ce o f woodland suggests another sou rce o f u n rest T h ere
w ere few locations in which the boundaries betw een the rights o f peasant
com m unities and the prerogatives o f the lords w ere so con tested as in
w ooded areas. Peasants claim ed rights to graze their animals, to gather
acorns or oth er dietary supplem ents (especially in hard tim es), and to gather
w ood for construction and fu e l During the eighteenth century, the value o f
w ood and w oodland w as rising fast as urban construction boom ed; as the
royal authorities attem pted to procu re the raw m aterials for their am bitious
shipbuilding program in their vain hope o f rivaling England at sea; and as
developing industries dem anded charcoal or tannin. The incentive for the
lords to reassert (o r assert for the first tim e) their claim s on the new
profitable forests ran directly counter to custom (and perhaps rural popula
tion grow th m ade custom ary peasant claim s m ore p reciou s).128 D id these
particular tensions play a role in the upheavals o f 1789?
We m ay also m easure the proportion o f arable land. To provision the
grow ing tow ns, it w as to the grainlands first and forem ost that urban
adm inistrators in search o f tranquillity and urban m erchants in search o f
profits turned. W ere regions o f extensive arable the scen es o f intense
con flict as landholders attem pted to expand their control over the production
125. CamiDe-Emest Labrousse, La crise de {économiefrançaise à ¡afin de {Ancien Régime et au

débutde la Révolution (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1944).
128. Michel \bveOe, ‘‘Les troubles sociaux en Provence de 1750 à 1792,” in Michel Ifoveüe, De
la cm au grenier: Un itinéraire en Provence au XVIIIe siècle. De {histoire sociale à l’histoire des
mentalités (Quebec: Serge Fleury, 1980), 230.
127. Marcel Lachiver, Vm, vigne et vignerons en région parisienne du XVIIe au XIXe siècle
(Pontoise: Société Historique et Archéologique de Pontoise, du Val d'Oise et du Vnm, 1962),
427-34.
128. Andrée Corvol, "Forêt et communautés en Basse-Bourgogne audix-huitième siède," Revue
Historique 256 (1976): 15-36, and "Les délinquances forestières en Basse-Bourgogne depuis la
réformation de 1711-1718,” Revue Historique 259 (1978): 345-88; Christian Desplat, “La forêt
béarnaise au XVIIIe siècle,” Annotes du Midi 85 (1973): 141-71; Pierre de SaintJacob, Lespqysans
de la Bourgogne du Nord au dernier siècle de {Ancien Régime (Paris: Société Les Belles Lettres,
1966), 488-90 and passim.
o f cereals? In part this expansion m eant the physical extension o f th eir

holdings, but it also m eant attem pting to extricate them selves from th e
constraints o f communal obligations that M ocked enclosures, prohibited th e
cutting o f ripened grain to the ground (assuring the stubble fo r the p oor)
and dictated the precise crop to be grow n or the date o f the h arvest W e
may also m easure the su ccess o f grain production from nineteenth-century
data on wheat and rye yields.m A region characterized by extensive waste
land, finally, should typically be one in which there is considerable land that
from the point o f view o f com m ercial opportunities is marginal (w hatever
the critical role such land may play in the local ecology ).
A s for the role o f the conflicts endem ic to these various land uses in the
social explosion, w e have already considered the grasslands. R egions o f
extensive arable, as also noted earlier, w ere prone to the subsistence
conflicts that avoided the grasslands, but tended not to experience the G reat
Fear. Any land use other than cereals made subsistence con flict less likely
but wasteland and grapes attracted the G reat Fear. And, perhaps a surprise,
none o f the patterns o f rural life, other than those characteristic o f pasture
land, significantly raised or im peded attacks on the seigneurial regim e. W as
this a peculiarity o f the specific m obilization o f the sum m er o f 1789, or d oes
it characterize our entire period?
Labor Migration
Finally, let us consider the general level o f rural well-being. M uch has been
made o f standards o f living in the com parative study o f peasant revolt, although
much o f the discussion is quite contradictory. In these term s, it has often been
asked whether it is poorer peasants who rebel (out erf their great need) o r the
m ore w ell-to-do (drawing on their greater resources). Eric W olf has imagina
tively put forth the “middle” peasant as the protagonist o f rural upheaval:1 130 the
9
2
person with an adequate supply o f both grievances and resources. It is not
hard to see why the literature is so contradictory and why W olf has been led to
propose such an ingenious resolution: general discussions o f the alleged
consequences o f extrem e rural poverty or o f relative ease lend them selves to
the m ost diverse expectations. A re the m ost m iserably destitute intrinsically
129. The data, derived from the study of the 1830s, are presented in the form of departmental
maps in Hugh D. Clout, “Agricultural Change in the Eighteenthand Nineteenth Centuries,” in Hugh
D. Clout, ed., Themes in the Historical Geography of France (New York: Academic Press, 1977),
420. More complex, composite measures oí land productivity are not explored here; see Hugh D.
Clout, Agriculture m France on the Eve of the RailwayAge (London: Croom Helm, 1980), 214-21;
Thomas D. Beck, French Legislators, 1800-1834: A Study m Quantitative History (Berkeley and
Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1974), 16,155-57.
130. Eric Wolf, Peasant Wars of the Tiventieth Century (New Ybric Harper and Row, 1973),
290-93.
radical because they suffer m ost grievously from the existing state o f affairs,
because they have the least to lose by risky action, and because the slightest
further deterioration in their circum stances at the hands o f landlord, tax
collector, tithe-holder, or nature may threaten survival? O r are they politically
immobilized (or only mobibzable for preservation o f the status quo) by virtue o f
their utter dependence on one or another protector, by their lack o f resources
to sustain any collective action on their own behalt and by utter aversion to
any extra risk w hatsoever? Alternatively, are the relatively w ell-off inherently
conservative because they evaluate their own positions favorably and have
som ething to lose should political action fail? O r are they a politically sensitive
and savvy group with the resources to sustain a fight, the knowledge to see a
favorable opportunity and the habits o f active leadership in local affairs?
What sustains this debate, no doubt, is that there is som ething to both
arguments (and to the Wrffian resolution as w ell). There will never be a
satisfactory generalization here; what is possible is a series o f specifications:
identifications o f contexts within which poorer or richer or in-betw een peasants
rebel (or in which cross-dass coalitions are form ed, to use the currently
fashionable language). In specific social settings, rural w ell-being and rural
destitution have specific meanings as they bring country people into particular
sorts o f relations with one another, with urbanites, with administrators.
We hope to m easure, if crudely, the gradations o f prosperity or m isery in
the French countryside in general (as opposed to the specific disasters o f the
late 1780s). In a rough way w e may approximate the depth o f poverty by the
patterns o f seasonal internal migration. Year after year, large numbers left their
hom es seeking em ploym ent The regions w here work was not to be had sent
agricultural laborers to the prosperous parts o f the kingdom as harvesters and
grapepickers; construction w orkers (like the stonecutters erf Limousin) traveled
far in search erf em ploym ent; peddlers traveled everyw here; itinerant school
teachers descended from the Alps. The Parisian basin, the lands along the
Rhône, the plains erf Languedoc, and other areas with paid w ork to be done
received this m igratory population. A survey carried out rather carefully under
Napoleon is our sou rce.131 We distinguish regions o f high emigration, too poor
to support their own populations, from the richer regions which received these
huge seasonal influxes. (The higher figures indicate em igration.) A s it happens,
regions o f immigration and emigration do not differ significantly in their
propensities to reb el
What Sorts of Places Had Revolts in the Summer of 1789?

Out o f the haze o f num bers, several im portant lessons em erge. F irst,
notions o f “ organizational capacity” and the like need to be set in specific
131. Data from Roger Béteille, "Lea migrations saisonnières sous le Premier Empire: Essai de
synthèse," Rtxnu dHistoirt Moderne tt Contemporain* 17 (1970): 424-41.
historical m om ents. T h e claim that the dense cooperative netw orks o f

northeastern villages o r the political experience o f self-rule o f M editerranean
(Hies produce an unusual propensity to revolt appear m ore or less plausible
in relation to different kinds o f even ts.132 The W est w ith its dispersed
habitations, is hardly short o f peasant m obilization. W e have also seen how
the evidence qualifies the idea that in the sum m er o f 1789, the openfield
north and east as w ell as M editerranean France w ere the prim e lo d o f
re v o lt And if w e look back at our earlier discussion o f the shifting regional
character o f rural revolution from 1788 into 1793, w e will recall that th e
great, national insurrectionary m ovem ent o f the sum m er o f 1789 is the on ly
point at which the risings take place throughout the northeastern plain.
B efore that sum m er, the role o f the Southeast stood out; after that sum m er
cam e the turn o f South-C enter and Southw est, and then the Southeast y et
again. If the breakthrough sum m er w as the N ortheast’s m om ent, th e
M editerranean coast, by contrast, stands out m ore at many oth er points in
our tum ultuous half-decade.
A secon d im portant lesson o f all these num bers is that there are both
com m onalities and differences in the contexts that nurture different form s:
m arket im pact seem s high for all form s, but literacy has m ore o f a negative
im pact on panic than it has an im pact o f any sort on anything else. Third,
the relationship o f environm ent and action is an intricate on e: catastrophically
high prices rises w ere m ore likely to raise the likelihood o f the G reat Fear
than o f subsistence con flicts, which, as many have been insisting sin ce
Louise T illy, seem to have been triggered by the visibility o f nearby grain
(at least, to take to heart the first lesson , in that particular tw o-m onth span).
And fourth, the im pact o f m arket and state: the m arket looks very prom ising
as a sou rce o f all sorts o f fault lines in the social ecology , the state partially
so. In that crucial sum m er, all m anner o f conflicts w ere m ore likely near a
tow n or good road. And the heavy hand o f the state may have created its
ow n lines o f fracture, as Tocqueville argued— but perhaps not quite w here
he saw th ose indpient fissu res; the peasants o f the pays d'élections are no
m ore prone to attack the lords than those o f the pays d’états. A t least in that
sum m er, one hastens to add: perhaps the story is different earlier o r later.
Beyond the Breakdown

We need to m ove beyond the m om ent o f breakdow n o f the old ord er, to set
the rural revolution in m otion— the only w ay to set it in dialogue w ith th ose
in Paris w ho claim ed to define the Revolution— and to see how the sorts o f
132. We will see below that such daims also appear more or less plausible at different times.
places that sponsored antiseigneurial revolts through the w hole turbulent

era w ere like and w ere distinct from those that sponsored oth er form s o f
peasant action. It would be tedious as w ell as im possibly confusing sim ply to
repeat the previous sort o f analysis for all tim e periods and all even t-types.
Antiseigneuriafism: Changing Contexts

I shall p roceed in tw o w ays. F irst, in this section , I shall look at w here
antiseigneurial even ts took place throughout the w hole period and then, in
the next section , at how the aggregate pattern o f antiseigneurial revolts
com pared to others across the entire five years. T he con texts o f anti
seigneurial actions are displayed in Table 7 .1 0 .1 shall use the sam e variables
as before, apart from om itting the price data for 1789 as irrelevant to the
flow o f even ts beyond that tim e. Rather than present the full array o f
num bers, as in Table 7 .8 , I shall display a pared-dow n version that only
show s w here there is a statistically significant difference betw een the 'lo w ”
and “high” bailliages. W hen there is such a difference I shall exp ress the
size o f the difference as a p ercen t A negative figure m eans that the "low ”
bailliages have the larger percentage that are insurrectionary. Thus the
secon d, “ antiseigneurial,” colum ns in Table 7.8 are used to construct the
fifth colum n o f Table 7.10. T he "length o f road” row gets a value o f 16%
since 24% o f bailliages w ith m ore than the m edian length o f royal road had
antiseigneurial insurrection while 8% o f those under the m edian did. On the
other hand, "openfield” gets -1 1 % because those areas not in the openfield
w ere m ore prone, in that tim e period, to rise against the lords.
Finally, the secon d colum n, “ O verall,” needs som e com m en t T o the
extent that w e are very concerned with how different con texts prom oted
antiseigneurial even ts at different tim es, it is the com parison am ong the
various colum ns that is o f in terest O ccasionally, how ever, it is useful to ask
w hether, on the w hole, antiseigneurial actions w ere favored by som e
particular con text; w e are especially likely to want to know this in com paring
the con texts o f antiseigneurial and other actions. T he secon d colum n,
which d oes not distinguish am ong our various periods but considers all
antiseigneurial even ts from the sum m er o f 1788 into the sum m er o f 1793, is
the (dace to look.
L et us now exam ine the table. N ot one single indicator is invariably
associated w ith such even ts. W asteland tends to be associated w ith antisei
gneurial events and arable w ith their absence after the first sum m er o f
revolution, as are low cereal yields, especially o f w heat, as antiseigneurial
m ovem ents shift to the south. And openfield is generally negatively associ
ated. We sim ply have to abandon the w hole notion o f a specifically antisei
gneurial openfield area, indeed o f an intensely solidary peasantry, bound by
intravillage solidarities forged in their interm ixed fields, and involved in
endless battles w ith the lord over the boundaries o f their collective righ ts
and his individual on es, taking the lead in the French rural struggle. E ven in
the spring and sum m er o f 1789, which w ere exceptional in the level o f
northern participation, the openfield’s only associations with antiseigneurial
actions are negative. (T he openfield’s contribution that sum m er, to recall
Table 7 .8 , w as in subsistence con flicts.)
But perhaps the thesis o f the solidary com m unity as the seedbed o f
struggle against the lords d oes have som ething to it and it is the identification
o f such com m unities as lying in the northern plains that is off. Certainly this
hypothesis w orks better than the openfield p rop osal The M editerranean
coast specifically (defined in practice here as the region o f olives and
alm onds) was especially active in the spring o f 1789, the w inter o f 1790, and
then alm ost continually from early 1792 on. And the associations, as
m easured by percentage differen ces, are quite substantial Yet even h ere
one m ust see that coastal Languedoc and P rovence are not alw ays the
nurturers o f antiseigneurial actions.
T he general notion that nucleated com m unities developed a special soli
darity that m ade them easy to m obilize against w hatever targets they
ch ose— including the lords— appears w holly im probable. T he few associa
tions with antiseigneurial actions are negative. Even taking into consideration
the questionable m easurem ents o f these settlem ent patterns, the thesis o f
quotidian solidarity as the key to revolutionary m obilization seem s very du
teous.
L itera cy'is alm ost perverse as a con tex t T he m ore literate zon es are
am ong the first to m ove against the lords in the fall o f 1788. A s peasant
unrest grow s, literacy ceases to play any special role for about three-fourths
o f a year. But in the large w ave o f early 1790 and the sm aller one o f June,
literacy reem erges as im portant, but it is now largely villagers from the less
literate areas w ho struggle over seigneurial rights. Even in the large w ave
o f early 1792— and beyond— it is alm ost consistently unlettered France that
is in action. Perhaps the m ore literate areas w ere quicker to see the dying
Old Regim e as ripe for claim ing their rights against the lords; perhaps they
w ere m ore in touch with the view s o f the urban elites and w ere, th erefore,
quicker to change their sense o f the possibilities for collective action;
perhaps their very reading generated a greater realism that helped inoculate
them against the G reat Fear (w hich w as far m ore extensive am ong the
unlettered; see Table 7 .8 ). B y the spring o f 1789, how ever, any distinc
tive antiseigneurial propensity o f the literate countryside had evaporated.
O nce the less literate rose, they turned on the lords, too, especially in the
Southw est and South-C enter (see Table 7 .6 ). W hile the m ore p recociou s
northern villagers stayed calm er after that first sum m er, on ce those w ho
depended on a public reading o f letters to acquaint them w ith the political
scen e entered upon the Revolution’s stage, they stayed on it fo r years.
A s fo r the pow erful con texts o f structural change, the penetration o f both
m arket and state appear to play a role but in different w ays. In alm ost every
tim e period antiseigneurial events are m ore likely near a big tow n o r a
stretch o f good road or both; the only exception is the initial half-year
beginning in the sum m er o f 1788. W hatever the role o f adm inistrative
centralization as a long-run cause o f antiseigneurial risings, how ever, it
appears in only a few o f our tim e periods and in none o f the peak tim es
excep t the relatively small peak o f sum m er 1791. Thus tow ns and roads
appear as very pow erful con texts overall: bailliages w ith a larger tow n had a
32% greater likelihood o f having an antiseigneurial rising som etim e in the
five-year span than other bailliages. But the pays délections, w hile a bit
m ore prone to such risings, d o not have enough o f an im pact to rise to
statistical significance overall and th erefore do not even get noted in that
secon d colum n o f Table 7.10. (T he difference is 7 % .)
On the oth er hand, it could also b e said that the earliest locales to rise
against the lords, in small num bers, even before the spring o f 1789, tended
to be in regions under the adm inistrative thrall o f centrally appointed
bureaucrats and that at several other m om ents, though not at the tim es o f
peak rural explosiveness, this elem ent m attered. T he point o f this pattern
is both the relevance and the lim its o f T ocqueville’s analysis. If the data do
suggest that an antiseigneurial cast o f mind w as being fostered w here the
king’s pow ers supplanted the lord 's responsibilities, and which may have
m ade pioneers in antiseigneurial actions out o f peasants in the pays d’élec
tions, the data also show how peasants from elsew here generally joined in
the fray; in the sum m er o f 1789, to take one especially im portant m om ent,
there is no special antiseigneurial edge at all w here Tocqueville leads us to
exp ect it
Five Years of Rural Revolt

A rriving at som e consideration o f overall propensities across the five-year
span, brings us to Table 7.11. Colum ns 3 -9 show the percentage difference,
w hen significant associated with the usual set o f variables and colum n 2
show s the differen ces when w e lump together all risings indiscrim inately. If
w e want to know w hether, on the w hole, one or another local con text favors
"risin g s,” w ithout being fiissy about what sort o f rising, or when, colum n 2
provides an answ er. This colum n is th erefore both a helpful sum mary and
m isleading about particular form s o f conflict at particular m om ents.
This table helps clarify the previous analyses. Town size and road length
em erge as pow erful indicators on ce again, prom oting all form s o f conflict
oth er than th ose over w ages. Even counterrevolution is sim ilar to other
form s o f m obilization insofar as its broadly structural contexts are con ceived.
L ocation in the pays d’élections also has a strong effect overall, exerting a
Migration
M ap 7.2. B ailliages w ith A n tiseign eu rial E vents: E arly M onths and P eak
E pisodes o f A n tiseign eu rial A ctivity
NOTE: The darkened billiages are those with at least one antiseigneurial event.
•
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Ifcble 7.11. Types of Rising by Social Contexts, June 1788-June 1793 (% Difference between Low and High Wues of triable at Left)
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Note: Only statistically significant percentage differences are shown in this table.
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A n tiseign eu rial E vents S u bsisten ce E vents
M ap 7.3. B ailliages w ith S elected F orm s o f In su rrection , Ju n e 1788 -J u n e

1793
NOTE: The darkened bailliages are those with at least one event
discernable im pact on conflicts over food, land, and w ages as w ell as panics.
Yet it is not an im portant con text for counterrevolution nor for antiseigneurial
events considered over the entire five-year span (as opposed to certain
specific m om ents). On the w hole, rund insurrection stays away from
openfield and arable and gravitates tow ard wine country, terrain with
extensive wasteland and mountain. Antiseigneurial actions esch ew as w ell
areas o f good cereal yields, ju st as the G reat Fear and other panics do.
Could this in part be due to antiseigneurial action after the sum m er o f 1789
m oving along a path opened up by that sum m er’s panic? We shall return to
this hypothesis below .
We have to abandon com pletely the claim that the dense social w eb o f
nucleated villages provided the basis for con certed action, since high-density
patterns o f rural settlem ent, if they do anything, turn out to inhibit rather
than enhance disruptive collective action. N ot only is counterrevolution
negatively related to concentrated settlem ent patterns— hardly a historical
surprise, although profoundly disconfirm ing the sociological hypothe
sis133— so are antiseigneurial and subsistence even ts, and religious events
as w ell. On the very im portant other hand, the South generally and the
M editerranean coast in particular (as defined by the cultivation o f olives o r
alm onds) are pow erful con texts indeed. The presen ce o f olives or alm onds
produces the m ost dram atic percentage differences in antiseigneurial insur
rection in the entire table as w ell as prom oting m ost other form s o f
insurrection. T he M editerranean coastal area is the m ost generally turbu
lent, although not notable for its counterrevolutionary action. Literacy’s
overw helm ingly negative effect when w e considered the entire five-year
span as a w hole m ay surprise som e (but it is less rem arkable in light o f the
previous ta b les).134 Although actions over land are engaged in by peasants
from m ore literate areas, virtually all other form s o f action, overall, are n o t
M igration, finally, appears associated with alm ost no form o f action, taken
overall. But it appears that regions o f extensive em igration also tended to
land conflict, both em igration and conflict, perhaps, being respon ses to land
scarcity. Som e fled, som e fou gh t
Market and State as Contexts of Revolt Summing Up

T h ere m atters m ust stand insofar as geographic variation in the penetration
o f the m arket is indicated by tow ns and roads (no doubt quite w ell) and
the replacem ent o f local authority by distant, im personal, rationalizing
133. Michel Vbvefle comments on the surprisingsolidarityof dispersed western peasants, beyond
what one would have expected from settlement patterns (La découverte de la politique, 293).
134. Perhaps the author was especially likely to be surprised since his earlier studies of the
risings of spring-summer 1789 alone showed literacy in a different light See “Literacy and Revolt”
bureaucrats indicated by the absence o f Provincial E states (less w ell).135

B oth w ere conflict-prom oting con texts. M arket expansion, by creating so
many fault lines— w ell-off versus destitute, tow n versus country, consum ers
versus producers, com m unities versus individual enterprisers, state agents
versus com m ercial in terests, landow ners versus leaseholders, long-standing
com m unities versus m igratory w ork-seekers, those w edded to traditional
techniques o f production versus those seeking the benefits o f innovation—
m ade likely many kinds o f con flict in the collapse o f the old order. The hand
o f the state drew frustration upon itself (probably what is happening in the
subsistence arena) and w recked the old assurances w ithout providing, yet
(if ev er), any new ones (perhaps the reason for the G reat Fear); yet as a
force directly im pelling a specifically antiseigneurial revolt, it appears w eaker
than Tocqueville thought, although notable at m om ents.
Methodological Autocritique
B efore leaving our data on the spatial location o f rural insurrection, let us
recon sider the lim its o f this data that w e set out in Chapter 5 and the
appropriate cautions that apply in the present analysis. T he small num ber erf
w age even ts in our sam ple taken togeth er with the very lim ited research on
such form s o f con flict, make the regional claim s above extrem ely vulnerable
to the possibility that future research will refute the very tentative picture
sketched h ere; the m uch larger num ber o f antiseigneurial or subsistence
even ts and the m uch greater tradition o f research on such form s o f conflict,
especially the form er, m ake the claim s offered above a good deal less
vulnerable and m ake m y ow n hypotheses rather less tentative. (Land
con flicts and anti-tax insurrections have an interm ediary statu s.)
We m ust also be on our guard against slipping into the assum ption that
regional (or oth er) patterns o f conflict on particular issues are fully repre
sented by open, self-proclaim ed, dram atic, vid en t, or assertive actions or
by those that frighten judicial, police, or adm inistrative authorities to take
note o f them in the w ritten form s that enter the archival record . O pen,
collective w age actions are rare during the Revolution, but this hardly m eans
that landow ners and laborers only rarely negotiated about w ages (fo r
exam ple, w ere m eals in the fields to be provided?); that disgruntled w orkers
had no w eapons but collective strikes (individuals voting w ith their fe e t could
som etim es do very w ell, at least when there w as w ork to b e had elsew h ere);
or that landow ners never engaged in preem ptive violen ce or recou rse to
authority (getting a potential agitator carted o ff by the police for vagrancy,
135. There were great differences in the autonomy of different Provincial Estates; the authority
of royal agents in the pays ¿flections was checked by the semiautonoroous courts, differentially
resistant The actual rationalization of the royal administration was quite variable, notable at some
moments and locations, not at others.
fo r exam ple) b efore collective withholding o f w ork got organized. T he data

tell us a great deal, but w e m ust be careful not to think it tells us even m ore
than it d oes. It is w orth being especially cautious, as evolving revolutionary
legislation w as creating new legal channels for peaceful disputation. If the
land legislation (see Chapter 8, p. 485) was sponsoring com munal referenda
on the future o f the com m ons, m ight not many disputants try out those new
channels rather than, say, land invasions? (Perhaps, but in this case it seem s
likely that legal and illegal channels w ere tried in the sam e places, as
indicated above, p. 351).
A Collection of Explanations and How to Sort Through Them

We have been testing the im pact o f specific variables on revolutionary
m obilizations in the French countryside. This has largely been an em pirical
exploration.136 We need a conceptual exploration as welL H ow are different
kinds o f explanations related to each other? W hat sorts o f things could a
particular thesis explain— and what are its lim its? L et us review the m ajor
sorts o f explanations o f the R evolution's origins and see what each purports
to explain. One very fruitful endeavor has been the search few long-term
structural changes that altered social relations in w ays that redefined group
interests, leading, in turn, to redefinitions o f desirable social arrangem ents.
Such desires m ight not even be expressed, not openly at any rate, while
opportunities w ere lacking, but under favorable circum stances they m ight
energize social m ovem ents and thereby radically transform institutions.
136. New research wS undoubtedly uncover more events, raising the possibility that some of
the spatiotemporal patterns found in this chapter wiD be called into question as our knowledge
expands. The broad patterns identified for a numerous class of events, like the antiseigneurial, are
less likely to be radically altered than our map of wage conflicts, which are scarce enough that a
fairly small number found elsewhere could alter the picture or anti-tax events (which have been
very muchunderstudied); but nonetheless some concern is warranted, and some level of reservation
is justified. At least three important investigations have recently uncovered rural conflicts that would
have entered my data set if I’d had them in time. Monique CubeOs has enriched our picture of
insurrectionary Provence in the spring of 1789, Peter McPhee has found a large number of
confrontations over seigneurial dues and tithes in the département of Aude only some of which have
been previously discussed in the literature and Nancy Fitch has found a previously unknown
antiseigneurial struggle in central France. CubeD’s data, if included, would slightly emphasize further
the early prominence of rural Provence in insurrection; McPhee’s data would augment the already
pronounced antiseigneurialism of our southwestern region as well as its propensity to produce
cooflkt with a religious aspect In neither case is the broad portrait altered, although McPhee’s data
would seriously alter one’s sense of a more finely localized insurrectionary geography within
Languedoc. Fitch’s data would make the North-Center appear somewhat more turbulent than it
does in this chapter, and more inclined to antiseigneurial actions inparticular. See Cubells, Horizons
de la Liberté; Fitch, “Whose Violence?”; and Peter McPhee, “Peasant Revolution, Winegrowing,
and the Environment: The Corbières Region of Languedoc, 1780-1830,” Australian Journal of
French Studies 29 (1992): 153-69.
T h eories about such structures m ight be poor at explaining what those

appropriate circum stances are and w orthless at predicting their occu rren ce,
but may nonetheless be rather pow erful in explaining the con flicts those
circum stances unleash, rather in the m anner o f current understandings o f
earthquakes that can explain how the earth m oves in response to the buildup
o f unrelieved pressures but that are nearly w orthless at predicting their
occu rren ce. (T h e day San Francisco crum bles w e will all know w hy, but no
one can foresee w hen). To follow the geological analogy, w e m ight see such
th eories as explaining the developing fault lines around w hich open conflict
will rage, w ithout necessarily any notion o f the trigger. T h e tw o m ajor
geological theories o f the Revolution o f this sort are associated with M arx
and Tocqueville. M ovem ent tow ard an integrated capitalist econom y on the
one hand or a rationalized central state on the other are held to have
generated m ajor stresses in local and national structures o f dom ination. In
this chapter it is prim arily the local structures, the w orld o f action o f
France’s villagers, that has concerned u s.137
For the eighteenth century, w e may use the penetration o f the regional
and national m arket into the village com m unity to stand for the strength o f
the forces significant in the M arxian m odel and the extent o f central con trol
by the royal bureaucracy for the Tocquevillean.
T he notion o f slow -changing structures, w hose slow change insidiously
lays dow n new fault lines, is only one approach to explaining social revolu
tion. T h ere are several other conceptions o f what an explanation might
involve. F irst, as an alternative to change, som e direct our attention to
m otivating attributes that exert their pow erful effect alm ost regardless o f
other, historically contigent, elem ents (and som e sociologists are m ore
com fortable when they can dispense with the “ alm ost”). Virtually tim eless
claim s about the consequences o f such attributes cannot possibly explain the
m om ent o f crisis, but m ight explain subsequent actions if w e see these
attributes as pow erful forces shaping the cou rse o f actions at critical
junctures. Such a notion as “ the b etter-off (o r the w orse-off) are always the
rebels because they always have the resou rces (or the grievances)” are o f
this s o r t T h ey do not tell us under what banners rich (o r p oor) will m arch;
still less do they tell us when (but they m ay, perhaps, tell us w ho d oes the
m arching). A secon d alternative to long-term structural change is a cultural
one, con ceived o f as at least sem i-autonom ous from a change in structures,
that leads people to evaluate their positions in new w ays. T ocqu eville's
explanation has som e elem ents o f this, in its stress on a réévaluation (or a
devaluation) o f seigneurial legitim acy, although he roots th ese cultural
changes, ultim ately, in structures. Claims that the Enlightenm ent altered
137. For the bearing of our data on other aspects of the Mandan and Tocquevfflean theses, see
Chapter 10.
public discourse (o r that spinoffs o f Jansenist theology did so ) are also o f this
s o r t W ith rural France in mind, and m ore particularly, the participation o f
rural people in rebellion, the grow th o f literacy seem s the place to lod e. Yet
a third alternative to a focu s on the slow buildup o f social fault lines, is to
lode fo r short-term shocks, to shift from a focu s on the structural to a
focu s on the conjunctural, the specific circum stances that precipitate the
explosion. H ere the “ Labrousse thesis” o f the catastrophic im pact o f food
scarcity on the outbreak o f revolutions has achieved the status o f a classic.
T he broad conclusion from the data is that explanations o f these various
sorts (oth er than the tunelessly generalizable pow erful causal fo rce ) do help
us understand som ething. T he high price o f food helped explain the G reat
Fear o f 1789, the advance o f the state helped explain subsistence distur
bances at certain points, literacy helped ward o ff the G reat Fear and perhaps
m ade a few rural com m unities m ore likely to develop an early m ovem ent
against the lords, and so on. Yet, plainly, nothing w e have looked at fully
accounts for the extent o f a shift to antiseigneurialism , let alone the tim ing
o f that sh ift T h ere is at least one m issing piece to the puzzle here. W e have
been searching for the contexts o f popular action. Is som ething inevitably
left out o f all such searches that em ploy the m ethod o f looking at the variety
o f local con texts? W hat is left out, I believe, is the interactive, dialogic,
processual character o f the situation o f the countryside. A part o f the
con text o f village action was the consequence o f the history o f previous
action (n ot ju st the structural, cultural, and conjunctural con text). And not
ju st their ow n previous action, but those o f other villagers, w hose aggregate
im pact on national institutions altered the situation. Peasants in village .X had
to deal with legislative actions, in part aim ed at an ensem ble o f forty
thousand peasant com m unities. T he local con text m atters; the blizzard o f
num bers w e have plow ed through show s th at But the local con texts d o not
account adequately for the shifts in peasant targets and tactics.
Unity and Diversity in Revolt

Even a casual glance at rural revolts leads one to w onder at their extraordi
nary diversity: We find differences in organization and patterns o f recruit
m ent, in alliances forged, in enem ies sought (and unsought). An im portant
recen t com parative literature puts such differences in the spotlight. Jeffery
Paige addresses the differences in the goals and targets o f squatters in the
Peruvian highlands, nationalists in Angola, and social revolutionaries in
Vietnam .138Jam es S cott’s case for the role o f a threat to subsistence as the
138. Paige, Agrarian Revolution.

driving force behind peasant uprisings is m ade all the m ore vivid by the
ideological gulf that separates the Burm ese and Vietnam ese instances on
which he focu ses.139 Theda Skocpol finds that differences in the patterns erf
their rural upheavals placed different constraints upon urban revolutionary
leaderships in France, Russia, and China (and offered different opportunities
as w ell): in France and Russia, the holders o f state pow er confronted a
countryside that had m ade an autonom ous revolution w ithout them , w hereas
in China, the Com m unist party and the rural m ovem ent had supported one
another sym biotically.140
If w e g o beyond these com parative treatm ents to exam ine rural upheavals
in a single country, w e find that narrow ing the geography o f the investigation
does not necessarily narrow the diversity o f rural m ovem ents. Students o f
the M exican Revolution, say, are unfailingly struck by the contrasts betw een
the zapateta m ovem ent o f central M exico with its overw helm ing land-reform
thrust and the diversity o f m ovem ents, such as the villistas o f the N orth,
w hose land-reform pressures w ere weak to minimal (not to m ention the
cristeros, w ho rose in defen se o f the church o r the virtually enslaved
people o f the southern plantations to whom the revolution cam e from the
ou tsid e).141 T he Brazilian N ortheast had its spectacular m essianic m ove
m ents but w as in the 1960s the location o f fierce confrontations over
landownership with significant participation by a variety o f feuding leftists
and in the 1980s saw a renew ed w ave o f conflict largely led by Catholic rad
ica ls.142
In its rural aspect, the French Revolution is a case in point with its many
form s o f con flict T h ese separate form s o f contestation w ere not nationally
coordinated and certainly the specific actions engaged in differed greatly. T o
what degree do these diverse struggles have com m on sou rces? One com
m on sou rce, surely, is the very breakdown o f the Old Regim e, o f which the
risings are them selves a constituent p a rt In Chapter 6 w e explored several
sorts o f cyclical tim e, the daily and m onthly rhythm s o f the revolutionary
tide. Perhaps w e see here, in the com m on release in action opened up by
regim e collapse, a different sort o f tim e, the m om ent that divides the w orld
139. James Scott, TheMoralEconomy ofthePeasant: Rebellion andSubsistence mSoutheastAsia

(New Haven; Yale University Press, 1976).
140. Skocpol, States andSocialRevolutions.
141. Alan Knight, TheMexican Revolution (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986).
142. Robert M. Levine, Vale of Tears: Revisiting the Canudos Massacre m Northeastern Brazil,
1893-1897(Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1992); Rui Facó, Cangaceiros
e Fanáticos: Gtnese e luías (Rio de Janeiro: Editora Civiïzaçâo Brasüeira, 1972); Joseph A. Page,
The Revolution ThatNever Was. The Brazilian Northeast, 1955-1964 (New York: Grossman, 1972);
Vanilda Pahra, ed., Igreja et questdo agrária (Sào Paulo: Edkôes Loyola, 1985); Thomas E.
Skidmore, The Mides of Military Rule in Brazil, 1964-85 (New York: Oxford University Press,
1988), 298-303.
into before and after, the kairos, the m om ent o f which “ m om entous” is the
adjectival form , the m om ent when all form s o f con flict w ere open.
T he com m onality is m ore than tem poral coincidence, the com m on effect
o f breakdow n; w e see that a num ber o f im portant social con texts nurtured
m ultiple form s o f revolt. C ounterrevolution, in its connection w ith a very
distinctive counterelite, m ight seem the clu ster o f rural actions m ost diver
gent from the others yet w e have seen it resem bles other form s o f rural
activism in being bom near tow ns, away from openfiekl and arable, in the
hills, am ong the less literate. O f aO our form s o f action, in fact, it is the
w age conflicts that are the m ost distinctive in contrasting with oth er kinds
o f con flict in their association with good cereal yields and w ooded areas.
B eyond such general considerations o f the com m on im pact o f the historic
m om ent and the com m on facilitating role o f the nearby tow ns, w e m ay
inquire w hether the act o f engagem ent in one insurrectionary m ode retarded
or facilitated the engagem ent in others. The literature suggests now the
on e, now the other. C ounterrevolution may seem sim ply antithetical to the
antifeudal thrust; L efebvre argued that the G reat Fear, som etim es, although
not alw ays, bypassed the insurrectionary locales o f the spring and sum m er,
but m obilized peasants for the future, especially the antiseigneurial fu tu re;143
A do, speaking prim arily o f O ld Regim e rebellious traditions, sees the
experien ce o f anti-tax events as the seedbed o f later, and different, revolu
tionary m obilizations; A do also argued that m obilizations for the constitu
tional church or against refractory priests spilled over into antiseigneurial
action ;144 and \fovelle has recently pointed to the interm ittent subsistence
conflicts o f the revolutionary years as a continual sou rce o f turbulent
m obilization that could readily shift into antifeudal form s.145
We can approach these issues m ore closely by inquiring, not about broad
regional patterns, but narrow ly local ones. We have our hundreds o f
bailliages. D o bailliages specialize in a single form o f action? D o bailliages
with one form o f rural engagem ent have all others? O r som e others? Table
7.12 presents som e sim ple quantitative evidence chi w hether bailliages with
insurrectionary actions at som e point tend to be the sam e that have such at
oth er points as welL For each o f som e half-dozen m om ents I identified those
bailliages that had already had at least one rising and those that would have
at least one later on. I then m easured the degree to which th ese w ere the
143. Lefebvre, Grande four, 247. More recently, Gay Ramsay’s study of the area around
Soissons stresses the geographic disjunction of early antiseigneurialiam and Great Fear. See Gay
Ramsay, Ideology ofthe GreatFear, 242, 254.
144. Ado, Krestianskoe dvizhenie, 58, 239.
145. VjveDe, La découverte de la politique, 59. Cynthia Bouton’s work on the Flour War of the
1770s shows subsistence events beginning to shade off into antifeudal actions. See The Flour War.
Gender, Class and Community in LateAncien RégimeFrench Society (University Park: Pennsylvania
State University Press, 1993).
Ih b le 7 .1 2 . Occurrence o f Insurrections in Same Bailliage Before and

After Selected Dates (Q -coeffidents)
Association o f Insurrection
Before Date and
Dates Insurrection After Date
January 31,1789 .79*

June 30,1789 .72****
August 31,1789 .71****
Decem ber 31,1789 .69****
February 28,1790 .70****
**<05.
***** < .0001.
sam e bailliages. T he table is quite d ea r that bailliages146 that already had

even ts are m ore likely to have them again. T h ose that have already had
events by early 1789, for exam ple, tend to have others later on, and so forth.
But d oes an insurrection o f one sort lead only to a repeated action o f the
sam e type, to the occu rren ce o f all types, or o f som e types? This question
needs a m ore com plex presentation, based on a m uch larger collection o f
figures. C onsider Table 7.13. This table is devoted to the discovery o f
w hether bailliages that had had incidents o f various types by late sum m er o f
1789 had incidents o f the sam e or other kinds later on. (W age even ts and
counterrevolution are only considered here with regard to their later
occu rren ce.) Mirabile dicht, the data are consistent w ith m ost claim s in the
literature. W here the G reat Fear touched a bailliage (see the last row o f the
table), antiseigneurial and other actions follow ed; subsistence even ts opened
the w ay to oth er form s o f action, as did anti-tax even ts. Subsistence
events early in the Revolution, indeed, are associated later on w ith both
antiseigneurial and counterrevolutionary even ts, bearing out V ovelle’s inter
pretation o f the generative but indeterm inative role o f conflicts over food.
W here the G reat Fear occu rred, sim ilarly, a broad spectrum o f other actions
follow ed. On the other hand, the G reat Fear seem s a vaccine against panics
dow n the road; the only significant negative relation in the table, in fact, is
betw een the G reat Fear and later panics.147
146. I examined a number of similar tables using different points to divide before and after and
will only summarize the results in this discussion.
147. One claim not borne out concerns the way antiseigneurial action is held to have warded off
the Great Fear, amatter that requires data not in this table. Despite frequent dans to the contrary,
starting with Lefebvre {GrandePeur, 247), the Great Fear was not averted by the prior occurrence
of nearby antiseigneurial events. Among 32 bailliages with antiseigneurial events prior to July 1789,
28 had instances of the Great Fear; among 64 with antiseigneurial events in July and August, 44
knew the Great Fear. Not only did a clear majority of such bailliages have the Great Fear, but that
proportion is larger than the proportion of bailliages without antiseigneurial events that had the
Fear. The Great Fear may have stayed away from the very community that had attacked its
Even the counterrevolutionary events do not altogether stand apart,

associated as they are with the prior occu rren ces o f food riots and panics.
But m atters are not so sim ple. If w e w ere to exam ine an analogous table,
but one that w as based on events that occu r before and after the end o f
February 1790, w e would find a positive association o f antiseigneurial even ts
b efore that date and counterrevolution after. In other w ords, the locations
o f the antiseigneurial w ave o f early 1790, but not earlier, saw counterrevolu
tion down the line. W estern Brittany, w e may recall, m ade a m ajor contribu
tion to that antiseigneurial w ave. L et us also recall our earlier observations
on the W est generally (see Table 7 .3 ) w here w e saw that som e third o f that
region’s bailliages had antiseigneurial even ts at som e point w hile som e third
w ere spared counterrevolution. W ere these the sam e third?
Table 7.14 displays, for the forty-th ree w estern bailliages, the occu rren ce
o r nonoccurrence o f antiseigneurial and counterrevolutionary even ts. T h ere
is a very strong association o f the tw o. The one-third o f W estern bailliages
with antiseigneurial even ts are by no m eans the sam e as those w ithout
counterrevolution. O f the fourteen antiseigneurial bailliages, a rem arkable
thirteen w ent on to participate in counterrevolution as w ell; and nearly half
the counterrevolutionary bailliages had had antiseigneurial even ts. The early
m obilizations, as R oger Dupuy has in sisted,148 are signs o f a political
engagem ent that can turn against the Revolution. W here w estern peasants
fought the lords early in the Revolution, they or their neighbors149 turned on
the regim e, and w ere joined by other peasants as w ell T he w estern
countryside was not diam etrically opposed to a revolutionary France, but
m erely w ent further and faster in a progressive rural disenchantm ent (se e
also Table 7 .7 ).
To sum up, the occu rren ce o f m ost form s o f con flict seem to make m ost
other form s o f con flict probable nearby. (O nly w age con flicts stand apart
from this generalization.) To what degree do w e have here a direct effect
in which one insurrectionary experience facilitates others? B y virtue o f
lord—my data, organized by bailliage rather thancommunity, do not permit me to resolve this—but,
mthat case, it must be that the Fear was actually attracted to villages that were near antiseigneurial
ones. (This is perfectly plausible if the Fear is sometimes an anxious reaction to antiseigneurial
actions by one’s neighbors.)
148. See, for example, Roger Dupuy, La GardeNationale et les débuts de la Révolution en IlU-et-
Vilame (1789-mars 1793) (Rennes: Université de Haute Bretagne, 1972), 262.
149. 1biur Dupu/s formulation a bit here since he insists that precisely the same villages, not
just the same general regions, shift from antiseigneuriafism to counterrevolution. It is a rather
different micropicture if it is the neighbors of anantiseigneurial village who mobilize for counterrevo
lution, suggesting a fear and hatred of rural blues by rural whites and giving us an image of a rural
civil war, perhaps closer to Donald Sutherland’s model than Roger Dupu/s. At the bailliage level,
my data do not distinguish between the two; an unpublished study by Sutherland shows that not a
single person named in Henri Sée’s important work as involved in antiseigneuriafism in 1790 turns
up on later lists of Chouans. 0 thank Sutherland for sharing this important datumwith me.)
I3^^323
I I
SqSl
V V V V
i*'** • *
• •
Ik b le 7 .1 4 . Occurrence o f Antiseigneurial and Counterrevolutionary Events in

Western Bailliages
Number o f Bailliages with

No Events At Least One Event
Number of Bailliages with No Events 14 1

counterrevolutionary
events
At Least
One Event 15 13
AT= 43.
Q - .85.
p < .01 (Fisher’s Exact Test).
accum ulated experience in creating organizations and choosing targets, by

virtue o f dem onstrating the w eakness o f authority that inspires others o r by
virtue o f frightening others into m obilizing them selves, one event m ay be a
spark. Rather than an em ulatory p rocess, how ever, the geographical propin
quity o f even ts could also be produced by the far-reaching effects o f pow erful
stresses. T he urban presen ce, for exam ple, m ay generate several even ts,
or even several sorts o f even ts, in close proxim ity, especially at propitious
m om ents. We can p ose the question o f em ulation versus pow erful con texts
as causal forces, but w e cannot resolve it w ith the m ethods em ployed here.
Center, Periphery, Peripheries

N o im age o f a unified or hom ogeneous peasantry can survive this chapter’s
look at the rural revolution(s)’ regionalization. France’s regions have distinc
tive patterns o f revolutionary action, both in the m ix o f even t-types and in
their tim ing. T he early respon ses o f the new revphitionary leadership to the
rural crisis, had as a backdrop the revolts o f the sum m er o f 1789, in which
w e have seen the m ajor role played by peasants o f the N orth. T he dram atic
m om ent in the latter part o f June when the National A ssem bly took the
plunge o f declaring its ow n existen ce against the king w as alm ost imm edi
ately follow ed by the great rising o f Parisian m ilitants and a num ber o f
incidents o f plebeian violen ce in Paris that their m em oirs and correspon
dence show to have been deeply upsetting to the legislators.150 Im m ediately
150. The impact on the legislators oí the violence around them is taken up in Timothy Tackett’s
Becoming a Revolutionary: The Deputies of the French National Assembly and the Emergence of a
Revolutionary Culture (1789-1790) (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 165-69.
on the heels o f th ese Parisian even ts, the deputies w ere hearing a rising
crescen d o o f reports o f rural turbulence from around the country; but w e
have seen how concentrated in the nearby N orth the even ts o f that particular
m om ent w ere. T he A ssem bly in early August cam e up with a package that
appeared to m eet the needs o f that m om ent; how frustrating and puzzling
that, a few m onths later, the very different peasantries o f the Southw est
and South-C enter rose and w ere not to be placated by explanations o f the
benefits brought by the new law s.151
N ot only did a good deal o f the R evolution's dynamism derive from below
and beyond the horizons o f the urban elites but each region o f France played
its special p a rt T he French-speakers o f the relatively prosperous plain
around and north o f Paris w ho had form ed the human resou rces on w hich
Capetian kings enlarged their realm dow n through the great seventeenth-
century expansion in the N ortheast, N orth, and Southeast— the Staatsvolk,
if one may em ploy so un-French a term — had their m om ents, but the leading
edge o f peasant pressure on the revolutionary state m ore often cam e from
farther off: antiseigneurial actions in Q uercy, Rouergue, Périgord, and
P rovence; land seizures in A lsace; counterrevolution in M aine and Brittany
(and in the Southeast as w ell). T h ese w ere not ju st rural even ts, but took
place far from Paris and even French speech, took place not so m uch in
central villages as those with m ore scattered livings (but also in and near
the large sem i-urban M editerranean villages), took place not so m uch in the
m ore literate as in the less literate places o f the kingdom .
C onsider one specific elem ent o f the peasant revolts that has sparked
som e good research: It w as in Périgord, Rouergue, and Q uercy that the
m aypole first em erged as a sign o f insurrection. The use o f m aypoles in
antiseigneurial actions diffused gradually through the countryside in the W est
and South. T he governm ent eventually appropriated and tam ed it as the
“ tree o f liberty.” T he anxious fascination with these genuinely plebeian
actions on the part o f educated revolutionary legislators show s up in B ishop
H enri G régoire’s extended essay on the m eaning and origins o f these
tre e s.152 G régoire rea d ies back in tim e to connect m aypoles to sacred
trees o f antiquity as w ell as to interpret them as m ultifaceted sym bols o f
nurturance: the tree shades and shelters, is long-lived and bears fru it A s to
its insertion into the history o f the Revolution, that w as, in G régoire’s
accou n t the w ork o f a local p riest in whom , w e may infer, resided a
m em ory o f the god s' oaks and groves o f antiquity and an appreciation o f
G od’s bounty today. This (false) history m anages to say everything about
th ese trees excep t their plebeian origins within the revolutionary co n te x t
151. We shall address the legislature in Chapter 8.

152. Henri Grégoire, “Essai historique et patriotique sur les arbres de b liberté,” in L’Abbi
Grigoin, Evtque des LumUns (Paris: Editions France-Empire, 1988), 192-212.
which has been effaced by a gift o f a paternal p riest G régoire, a clerical

legislator, explains to the people a priestly gift and (Hie m ight alm ost forget
that the actual audience for G régoire’s long essay w as a puzzled and anxious
urban elite, including his fellow legislators, w ho w ere trying to m ake out
what sem iliterate southw estern sharecroppers w ere getting at w hen they
planted these p oles on seigneurial lawns. O nce the central authorities took
up these p oles, associated them with liberty, and produced a historical
interpretation altogether deplebeianizing them , central standardizing pres
sures rapidly led to their diffusion throughout the country. N ow , finally, the
trees took root in the northern countryside.153
T h e national history o f the Federation m ovem ent o f the village National
Guards is less w ell w orked ou t,1541 5but resem bles that o f the tree o f liberty
in som e w ays, although the earliest spark is not from the rural periphery. A
num ber o f tow ns began to authorize (in som e cases (Hie m ight speak o f
“ revitalize” ) arm ed m ilitias as the sen se o f disorder m ounted. Ito y e s was
an im portant initiator, as early as April 1788, and several tow ns follow ed
suit in the w inter and spring o f 1789,1581 9perhaps especially com m only in
5
P rovence w here the rural m obilization w as so intense and threatening.156
B y M ay and June, fear o f attacks on grain harvests led several intendants to
perm it or even prom ote peasant m ilitias.157 T he attem pted form ation o f a
Parisian militia in July helped bring on the attack on the B astille; the king’s
subsequent recognition o f the Paris National Guard by appointing Lafayette
its com m ander158 no doubt spread a general legitim ation over such bodies.
During the urban and rural upheavals o f July and August, not only larger
tow ns but many villages form ed National Guard units o f their ow n ,150 often
spurred, locally, by the G reat Fear. The degree to which the Parisian Guard
w as an inspiring m odel that diffused into rem ote villages as opposed to the
d egree to w hich the Parisian organization provided a legitim ating cov er for
what som e villagers wanted to do anyway is hard to assess. The National
A ssem bly’s recognition o f m ilitias on August 10, 1789, granted a further
legitim ation (4 P 8:378). T he election o f new local authorities early in 1790
generated a new w ave o f rural Guards units as these new authorities sought
to organize arm ed fo rce .160 The National A ssem bly’s recognition that these
153. \fovefle, La découverte de lapolitique, 44-55.

154. Ibid., 38-44.
155. Jacques Godechot, The Hiking of the Bastille, July 14, 1789 (New %ric Scribner, 1970),
129,132,174.
156. On the formation of town nditias in Provence in the spring see CubeOs, Horizons de la
tiberti, 111-12.
157. On these early rural nditias in Soissotmais, see Ramsay, Ideology ofthe GreatFear, 221-25.
158. Godechot, Bastille, 196, 260.
159. The most thorough regional study so far is Dupuy, La GardeNationale en IUe-et-Vüame.
160. Paul dHollander, “Les Gardes Nationalesen Limousin (juillet 1789-juiflet 1790),” inAnnales
Historiques de la Révolution Française 58 (1992): 471.
new municipal authorities would have param ilitary units under their com
mand provided an opening (and, perhaps, also publicized an organizational
p ossibility).161 But the National Guards probably had another sou rce as welk
the detested militia o f the Old R egim e.162 Although, as the cahiers make
d ea r (se e Chapter 2, p. 39), militia service was loathed, the experien ce o f
service in locally recruited, organized, and officered m ilitary units— as the
m ilitias som etim es w ere— w as very likely an im portant m odel for many a
villager and many a village to draw on in 1789, and beyond, but now w ith a
far larger voluntary com pon ent Significant num bers o f villages m ight form
such bodies. In Lim ousin, for exam ple, som e 10% o f com m unities form ed
Guards units.163 In our data set on even ts, these National Guard units w ere
som etim es an im portant strike force in antiseigneurial cam paigns or oth er
insurrectionary actions. Nancy Fitch’s research has unearthed a striking
instance near Autun in our N orth-Central reg ioa In the fall o f 1789, the
village o f Issy-1'E vêque placed its priest in com m and o f its new ly form ed
Guards, w ho directed them in seizing grain from large produ cers. T h e
p riest's election as m ayor by appreciative villagers did not prevent his
a rrest (A local petition for his release praised him for putting the National
Guards behind ordinary p eop le.)164 Initiative in antiseigneurial action on the
part o f Guards units was not always the result erf a radical com m ander. In
January 1790, for exam ple, the head o f the nearby National Guards unit at
Guichen in Brittany tw ice failed to bring back a satisfactory renunciation o f
his seigneurial rights from a local lord; that unfortunate com m ander w as
pushed aside by his guardsm en, w ho accused him o f selling them out for a
161. The interplay of efforts at central control and grassroots initiative is striking. In the brief
parliamentary debate on the proposal for new structures of local government on February 2,1790,
Viscount de NoaiDes proposed an amendment, immediately adopted, barring “national militias” from
meddling in local government and enjoining their obedience to proper officials. Thus the legislation,
presumably aimed at controlling local aimed groups that were already formed, implicitly accepted
the existence of “armed companies under the title of bourgeous militia, national guards, volunteers
or under any other denomination” (AP 11:417-19). Eleven months later Robespierre waxed
enthusiastic over the possibility of a nationwide ensemble of local Guards units, inwhichmembership
is open to all regardless of wealth, as “the spectacle of a vast hidden empire of free and armed
citizens.” But he was quick to stress that local units were to be underjudicial or legislative control.
The importance he attached to the National Guards may be judged from the length of his discussion
and the thoroughness with which he has thought through issues of purpose, relation to the array,
membership, control, and even the design of uniforms. Another measure of the significance of the
Guards is the debate occasioned by Robespierre’s speech to the Jacobins. See Maximilien Robes
pierre, Oeuvres, voL 6, Discours 1789-1790 (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1950),
610-55; the quote is from 632.
162. Dupuy makes this argument for Brittany inLa GardeNationale en Ille-et-Vilaine, 23-40.
163. Compiled from figures in Paul d’Hollander, “Les Gardes Nationales en Limousin,” 469.
164. Nancy Fitch, "Whose Violence? Insurrection and the Negotiation of Democratic Politics in
Central France, 1789-1851,” presented to the conference on Violence andthe Democratic lYaditioQ
in France, University of California at Irvine, February 1994,13-14.
bribe, and w ho th at w ent on to rip the lord 's benches from the nearby
church, set fire to the lord 's papers, do a good deal o f general dam age to his
château, and drink his cid er.165
Perhaps com bating a sense o f isolation, such local National Guards
som etim es affiliated w ith one another.166 T he first-know n such act o f
federation seem s to have been in the Alps in the fall o f 1789.167 T he p rospect
o f an intervillage netw ork o f such Guards units, arm ed and disciplined, m ust
have been very disturbing to som e. D ealing with village action that w as
generally uncoordinated am ong separate villages w as proving hard enough.
Tow ns attem pted to seize control o f the m ovem ent by organizing their ow n
urban-centered federations o f the arm ed citizenry. T he urban Guards
federation could becom e a pow erful vehicle for, say, a radical city like
M arseille to en force its vision o f the Revolution throughout P rovence in
com bat with a precociou s southeastern counterrevolutionary m obilization.
U ltim ately Parisians sought national control o f these netw orks; the Festival
o f Federation o f July 14, 1790, w as as m uch an effort at channeling popular
revolution (by organizing it) as it w as o f celebrating it
T h e political chibs o f all persuasions that blossom ed throughout the
French countryside w ere yet another organizational indicator o f the rural
periphery’s initiative.16819T h ese signs and seedbeds o f rural political activism
6
w ere often joined by a group o f villagers collectiv ely,166 and in the overall
judgm ent o f their historians, w ere m ade up o f perhaps one-half “ cultivators,”
one-third artisans and shopkeepers, and a sprinkling o f local notables,
perhaps a law yer or tw o. T h ey w ere far m ore densely im planted at an early
stage in the southern countryside than in the N orth. The northern clubs did
w ell, to be sure, in district and departm ental cen ters; but in your ordinary
northern village this vehicle o f a political action w as scarce. N ot so in the
South; in the D epartm ent o f Vaucluse, a stunning 91% o f com m unities had
d u b s.170 In parts o f the South, even places with few er than five hundred
person s m ight w ell have a chib, w hich m eant that these organizations w ere
reaching even m ore deeply into the depths o f the countryside than the
religious confraternities o f the Old Regim e for which the South w as fam ous,
which hardly existed in such small p laces.171 (A population o f tw o hundred
165. Henri Seé, "TYoubles agraires en Haute Bretagne,” 319-22.

166. Yoichi Uriu, "Espace et Révolution.”
167. Michel VbveUe, ed, "Les fédérations” in Unele, ed., L’état de la France pendant la
Révolution (Paris: Editions de la Découverte, 1968), 216-17.
168. Jean Boutier and Philippe Boutry, Atlas de la Révolution française, voL 6, Les sociétés
poiitiques (Paris: Editions de l’Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, 1992).
169. Ibid., 59.
170. Ibid., 103.
171. On the role of political dubs and National Guards in rural Auvergne, see Jonathan R. Dalby,
Les paysans cantaliens et la Révolution française (1789-1794) (Clermont Ferrand: Université de .
Clermont-Ferrand Œ, 1989), 258-62.
seem s to be the threshold below which villages did not develop d u bs eith er.)
O nce again, the new state took over the du b m ovem ent and w ily then
did the northern villagers, taking their cue from the cen ter, form such
groupings them selves.
T he role o f France’s peripheries is vital generally. Tim othy Tackett has
show n the W estern urban elite to be unusually prone at the on set o f
revolution to force a show dow n with the church;172 Lynn Hunt finds the L eft
m ore im planted in the periph ery;173 a flurry o f recen t research on electoral
participation, particularly M alcolm C rook’s and M elvin E delstein’s, show s
not only that early in the Revolution rural participation was generally higher
than urban, but that som e locations in the rural South and C enter com pared
favorably with the N orth in voting ra tes;174 and I have found that Third
E state and nobility in econom ically p oor and politically peripheral areas w ere
m ore polarized in their view s in the cahiers than they w ere in the econom ic
and political cen ters o f the kingdom .175
Tracking the Rural Revolution through

Time and Space
G reat social m ovem ents som etim es seem to follow a regular rhythm . An
initial opportunity seized by the hardy opens a breach in the established
order that others follow . T h ose engaged seek new form s o f action and
eventually find form s that yield som e m easure o f su ccess yet do not
bring down to o m uch counteraction from elites or governing authorities.
M eanwhile new groups form , taking advantage o f the opening; still other
172. Tackett, Religion, Revolution andReligious Culture.

173. Lynn Hunt, Iblitics, Culture and Class in theFrench Revolution (Berkeley and Los Angeles:
University of California Press, 1984). Timothy Tackett’s work on the National Assembly shows the
legislature’s emergingJacobins of 1790 to be disproportionately of rural, southern, and less wealthy
backgrounds than their fellow legislators. See Tackett, Becoming a Revolutionary, 286.
174. In reviewing a great variety of electoral research by himself and others, Edelstein finds, for
example, that in some dozen departments studied, the country people always outvoted the dty-
dweDers in the elections of May 1790. The urban-rural difference was less sharp one year later. In
impoverished Limousin, communities with under five hundred inhabitants had a spectacular turnout
of 78% in February 1790 (as compared to the city of Limoges with 47%); by December 1792,
Limousin’s small villages had fallen to the initial level of Limoges. See Melvin Edelstein, “La place
de la Révolution française dans la politisation des paysans,” Annales Historiques de la Révolution
Française, no. 280 (1990): 135—49; Edelstein, “Electoral Behavior During the Constitutional
Monarchy”; and Olivier Audevart, "Les élections en Haute-Vienne pendant la Révolution,” injean
Bouder, Michel Cassan, Paul d'Hollander, and Bernard Pornmaret, eds., Limoges en Révolution
CIVeignac Editions “Les Monédières,” 1989), 129-38.
175. Shapiro and Markoff, RevolutionaryDemands, chap. 16.
forces, w ho initially held back, m ay eventually en ter the fray. Sidney

T arrow 's w ork on social m ovem ents has probably given the m ost cogen t
such account and his study o f Italy in the 1960s and 1970s is probably the
m ost detailed single such treatm ent along these lin es.176
Since the location o f various configurations o f interest and resou rces is
often geographically structured the likelihood that large-scale m ovem ents
m ay exhibit spatiotem poral pattem ings is high and Tarrow ’s Italian data
constitutes a case in point as protest m oves from students to w orkers to
clergy and from one tow n to another. Revolutionary m obilizations m ay also
exhibit such patterns. M arc Ferro observes o f the 1917 Russian Revolution
that it began in the cities, m oved into the forests and their clearings, and
then arrived at steppe and m ountain.177
Our French data suggest som e elem ents o f this picture, but deviate from
it in the direction o f greater com plexity. Rather than a m ovem ent from
cen ter to periphery, w e have seen a m ore intricate interplay o f regional
initiatives. M uch o f the m ore prosperous and literate countryside o f northern
and eastern France has its great m om ent only after prelim inary skirm ishing
in the W est and a considerable battle in the Southeast (w ith the Paris region
the only northern zone to rival early P roven ce). In the sum m er o f 1789,
how ever, the rural com ponent o f the popular upheaval that w as such an
im portant spur to the National A ssem bly, w as concentrated in the N orth and
E a st W ith the Old Regim e broken, the main action is elsew here (and for
years) but not in a single place, nor in a single form o f con flict as South-
C enter, S outhw est Southeast and W est all play various roles. Various
locations in the N orth and East continue to be the cen ters o f battles
around subsistence, land, taxation, and w ages, but not usually around the
num erically m ost im pressive antifeudal actions. But these antifeudal actions
only becam e predom inant after that sum m er.
T he tem poral pattern o f insurrection, both the m icrorhythm s o f the
w eekly cycle and the ebb and flow over the m onths, gave us som e sen se o f
the interplay o f traditional and tradition-breaking patterns in the revolution
ary countryside (see Chapter 6, pp. 332 e t se q .). Spatially, a northern and
eastern location for the drama o f the sum m er o f 1789 w as alm ost as m uch
an innovation as w as the rapidly rising antiseigneurial focu s, the m ove away
from Sunday as the favored day for mayhem and the weakening o f the cod es
that lim ited mutual ruin at harvest-tim e. T he great historical w orks on the
rural revolts o f the seventeenth century have m ade w estern, southw estern,
and southeastern place-nam es stand for resistance to conscription, resis-
176. Sidney Harrow, Democracy andDisorder: Protest and M ilks m Italy, 1965-1975 (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1989).
177. Marc Ferro, The Russian Revolution of February 1917 (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-
Hal, 1967), xL
tance to taxes; in a w ord, resistance to the grow ing state apparatus o f

extraction. Roland M ousnier’s classic Fureurs Paysannes, for exam ple, has
vivid chapters on the Croquants o f Saintonge, Angoum ois, and Poitou o f
1636, the Croquants o f Périgord o f 1637, and the Nu-Pieds o f Norm andy o f
1639. (T he Torrébens o f low er Brittany o f 1675, exceptionally in M ousnier’s
account, are even m ore strongly m obilized around seigneurial questions
than taxation).1 179 Y ves-M arie B ercé goes bade a bit further to d ie Tard-
8
7
Avisés o f Lim ousin and Périgord (1 5 9 3 -9 5 ).179 He identifies the places
w hose people w ere known by contem poraries for their hot-blooded ferocity
in resisting seventeenth-century taxation: the m arshes around L es Sables
d'O lonne in Poitou; the w oods and wasteland along the Paris-B ordeaux road
in Saintonge and Angoum ois; a forest south o f Périgueux; the plains w here
Q uercy and Lim ousin m eet and w here Q uercy m eets Rouergue; the valleys
o f the P yrenees.
A fter the sum m er breakthrough in 1789, it is precisely these places
(excep t for Norm andy) that appear again and again in our accounts, as A lbert
Soboul pointed o u t The classical heartlands o f the seventeenth-century
rural tax revolt— Brittany, Périgord, Lim ousin, Rouergue, Q uercy, as w ell
as P rovence180— are w here the peasants cam e to refu se the abolition o f
feudalism as the National A ssem bly defined it in August 1789. For the m ost
part these areas cam e late to antiseigneurial action (apart from a precociou s
P rovence, already the setting o f violent struggle in the spring). Sidney
Tarrow has suggested that w e see great social m ovem ents as initially
generating opportunities for innovators in tactics and organization; these
m ovem ents are later joined by m ore traditional actors, w ho see their ow n
opportunities in the initial su ccesses o f the pioneers. Our geography o f
revolt fits, if im perfectly. T he traditional heartland o f revolt rises, beginning
in late fall 1789, not against its traditional target, but the new er on e, and
after others had pioneered. T he deviation from the Tarrowian m odel here is
the early m obilization in P rovence, not only early to m obilize at all (the sam e
could be said even m ore strongly o f Brittany) but early to begin the shift
tow ard seigneurial targets. N ot all o f France's villagers in regions o f past
strong anti-state m ilitance needed the exam ple o f northern innovators to
decide to m ove against the lords. T he spatiotem poral rhythm s w ere com
plex, and w ere certainly not ju st them es stated in the cen ter and then
responded to with so many variations in the periphery. T h ere w ere distinct
178. Roland Mousnier, Fureurspaysannes: Lespaysans dans les révoltes duXVIIt siicU (France,
Russie, Chine) (Pans: Calmann-Lévy, 1967).
179. Yves-Marie Bercé, Histoire des croquants: Étude dessoulèvementspopuläres auXVIIestick
dans k sud-ouest de la France (Geneva: Droz, 1974).
180. Provence was a center of seventeenth-century revolts, but René PiDorget’s work suggests
that these were largely urbanaffairs. See René PiDorget, Les mouvements insumctionels deProvence
entre 1596et 1715 (Paris: A. Fedone, 1975).
peripheries and the social m ovem ent w as m ore a polyphonic structure than
a sonata.
W e have seen many regional differen ces— Alsatians rising against the
lords in the sum m er o f 1789 and rem aining calm , m ostly, thereafter and
peasants o f the South-C enter and Southw est w ho d o not rise until the end
o f that year, but prove alm ost im possible to pacify from then on— but what
all th ese rebellious country people had in com m on w as that they w ere not
ju st talking to one another, but w ere in a dialogue with th ose w ho adminis
tered and those w ho m ade the laws. Far from the villages, France’s
enlightened, revolutionary legislators w ere an essential part o f the poly
phonic structure.
We have seen how active w as the B reton countryside even before the
spring o f 1789 and how active was the Provençal countryside that spring—
not only active, in fact, but a leader in the shift to antiseigneurial actions.
One m ight point to structural factors: the Provençal heritage o f com munal
solidarities, for exam ple, yet the specifics o f tim e and target seem ed elusive.
O nce w e introduced the im m ediate political con text into the discussion,
how ever, w e advanced our grasp on what w as happening. T he intensive
cam paign for the hearts and minds o f Brittany’s rural people in the bitter
debates that preceded the final decisions on the structures o f the E states-
G eneral may help us, as R oger Dupuy su ggests,181 to understand the early
m obilization o f the B reton countryside; the sim ilarly bitter, com plex, elite
struggles in P rovence, which cast the fief-holding nobility as an intransigent
and avow edly reactionary force may help explain not only the early engage
m ent o f that province’s popular classes, but the early antiseigneurial tum .
If distinctive regional political con texts and regional elite-plebeian dia
logues help us grasp popular engagem ent prior to the sum m er o f 1789, after
that sum m er peasant com m unities throughout France all had the sam e
pow erful interlocutor as each other: the revolutionary legislature. T he w hole
drama from the June declaration that there was a National A ssem bly through
the proclam ation o f the abolition o f the feudal regim e in early August, m ade
a national dialogue o f village and legislature, o f peasants and legislators, at
the cen ter o f the subsequent revolutionary dynam ic. B efore the sum m er o f
1789, the varying elite dram as in F rance's different regions shaped peasant
insurrectionary politics differently; after that sum m er there w as a national
legislature w hose m em bers ached to reconstruct France but found that they
had to deal with forty thousand villages.
And innovation cam e from everyw here. O ne im portant village organiza
tional innovation not present in the Old Regim e w as the National Guards,
perhaps appropriated from the Parisian m odel that lent it legitim acy. It w as
hard to ban National Guards in the village after accepting them in Paris. Yet

the village guard probably w as taking cm a life o f its ow n, threatening to

becom e a grassroots arm ed force. The cities, appreciative o f the threat,
m oved to rep ossess the Federation m ovem ent, as Paris m oved to in corp o
rate the tree o f liberty into the revolutionary cult, but on its ow n term s,
under its control. Villagers innovated, em ulated, and w ere em ulated.
T he Revolution w as not the w ork o f Paris, im posing itself on its provin ces.
It w as not the w ork o f an elite prom oting m odernity. It w as not the w ork o f
a hom ogeneous peasantry, nor o f a single region. The Revolution was the
interplay o f peripheral elites and central adm inistrators, o f elites and plebe
ians, o f the differently tim ed pressures from northern villagers and from
those far from Paris. The initial breakthrough in antiseigneurial legislation
took the nationwide explosion o f the sum m er o f 1789 with its strong Paris-
area and generally northern participation. C reativity in new organizational
veh icles, in actions, and in rejecting the legislators’ com prom ise o f August
4 ,1 7 8 9 (see Chapters 8 and 9 ) w ere to be found elsew here. But as peasant
rebellions w ere an essential con text for antifeudal legislation, antifeudal
legislation w as an essential con text for peasant action. France’s regionally
diverse peasantries did not rise in a political vacuum . T hey w ere not m erely
propelled to fight by their varying interests as given by the local conditions
o f w ork and the local structures o f social relations; they w ere not m erely
enabled to fight to different degrees by resou rces that varied am ong different
kinds o f com m unities. T hey w ere not ju st discovering the possibility o f
fighting in local opportunities, and they surely w ere not ju st expressing their
anger, bom o f local structures and relations in locally varying favorable
circum stances. T h ere w ere forty thousand peasant com m unities, and in
each, people w ere deciding to act or to stay on the sidelines. The Revolution
w as engaged in differently in obscure places that few had even heard o f
fifty kilom eters away: R expoëde, Saint-Jean-des-Choux, Taradeau, Q uézac,
Cabris, Jazeneuil, Puyvaladour, M éxim ieux, D ieu-le-F it, Saint-Jean-de-
G ardonnenque, Saint-Bonnet-TVoncet, Chénérailles, and C ouëron. T h ose
w ho lived there w ere making their ow n decisions and m ade them differently
but they w ere not making forty thousand disconnected revolutions. T h ere
w as a French Revolution. TVying to define, direct, con trol, and even em body
this national revolution was its central legislature. France’s villagers w ere in
a dialogue with the lawm akers o f France, a dialogue I shall attem pt to follow
in the chapters to com e.
C h apter
8
Revolutionary Peasants
and Revolutionary
Legislators
The “ Eternally Celebrated”

Night of August 4
C lose to tw o in the m orning o f August 5, 1789, the National A ssem bly’s
ch eers for "L ou is XVI, restorer o f French liberty” w ere cut o ff by the
session ’s presiding officer in order to enact a form al d ecree that briefly
sum m arized the many proposals that had em erged during the long hours o f
discussion. An exchange o f congratulations am ong legislators and onlookers
brought the session to a close. Follow ing som e further debate over the next
several days, the A ssem bly adopted on August 11 a m ore elaborate state
m ent that began with the dram atic w ords: “ T he National A ssem bly d estroys
the feudal regim e in its entirety” (4 P 8:350, 3 9 7 -9 8 ).
T he National A ssem bly had ju st been the scen e o f a sequence o f even ts
as unexpected, dram atic, and m ysterious as the G reat Fear in the country
side. The agenda for early August had called for progress on a D eclaration
o f Rights by w ay o f preface to the Constitution (A P 8:339-41). This task

was to be interrupted on August 3 by another o f the anxious reports on the
situation in the countryside that w ere becom ing regular occu rren ces. T h ere
w as som e talk o f defending property rights, o f repressive m easures and o f
poor relief (A P 8 :3 3 6 -3 7 ). On the evening o f August 4, Target introduced a
m easure that addressed “ the sacred rights o f property and the safety erf
persons” by reaffirm ing existing law. B efore this rather routine proposal
could be debated the floor was seized by viscount de NoaiDes, w ho m ade
the first o f many radical proposals on rural exactions (4 P 8:343). Suddenly,
one deputy after another began to call for an end to the feudal regim e, with
som e proposing rather drastic m easures. What m ight have seem ed a usual
round o f speech es, if on an unusually central and contentious issu e,1
suddenly altered character as the deputies began to m ake personal renuncia
tions o f their ow n privileges. A large num ber o f nobles rose to speak— and
renounce. T he clergy joined in, abandoning som e o f their ow n rights. N ot to
be outdone, m em bers o f the Third E state announced that they w ere
prepared to give up tow n privileges. Entire regional blocs o f delegates
declared an end to their ow n region’s special status. O thers raised a range
o f other issues, not all o f which w ere taken up: tax privileges, governm ent
stipends, the guilds, slavery. This w ent on late into the night, w holly defying
any attem pt to keep track, and before it w as over, all m anner o f oth er
elem ents o f the Old Regim e had been offered by som eone to the dustbin erf
history. We know from their letters, journals, and m em oirs that many
deputies gave them selves over to the exaltation o f casting o ff the past and
fusing with others in a prim ordial experience o f fraternization.2 O thers w ere
stunned by the nuttiness about them ;3 still others kept their head but judged
it prudent to join in;4 and others yet again m anaged to try to steer things
one w ay or another for idiosyncratic m otives.5
1. Little in the cahiers had so set nobility and Third Estate apart See Chapter 3 as well asJohn
Markoff and Gilbert Shapiro, “Consensus and Conflict at the Onset of Revolution: A Quantitative
Study of France in 1789,” AmericanJournal ofSociolo& 91 (1985): 44—47.
2. Looking back after a longer experience of revolution, BaiDy recalled: “After the troubles that
had just excited us, it rested one’s soul to see this agreement among the representatives of the
nation, this imposing union of the wflls of all and this competition in sacrifice for the public good.
Beautiful moments, where have you gone?” See jean-Sytvain Baffly, Mémoires de Bailly (Paris:
Baudoin, 1821), 2:217.
3. The journalist Charles Lacretefle described the morning after. "The next day most noble and
clerical deputies appeared astonished, anxious, ahnost confused”: Histoire de la France pendant le
dix-huitième siècle (Paris: Tfeuttel et Würtz, 1821), 7:142. Many observers, including some
deputies, felt that too much dinner wine made a mqor contribution to the event, a these to which
Kessel gives some credence; see Patrick Kessel, La nuit du 4 août 1789 (Paris: Arthaud,
1969), 192-%.
4. On August 7, the marquis de Ferrières, summarizing the tumultuous evening’s events in a
letter to a good friend, sketched some of the elevated reasons for approving those events and then
offers this explanation of his own adherence: “It would have been useless, even dangerous for you,
Revolutionary Peasants and Revolutionary Legislators 429
T he rich com plexity o f even ts is reflected m the m em oirs o f A . C.

Thibaudèau, a young law yer w ho accom panied his father, a Third E state
deputy from Poitou. He describes an “ exaltation” that extended to “ delirium ”
in which “ I w as caught up, like everyon e.” But it w as hard to feel sure one
fully understood the cou rse o f even ts. “ W as it real? W as it a dream ?”
Waking the next day, “ one thought over the evening's w ork. Then cam e the
calculation o f losses, o f vanities, o f regret and repentance. H ow could one
have abandoned on eself to this dizzy excess? It w as beyond im agination and
one felt sham e.” A bit further on he offers a very different story o f noble
sacrifice. “ T he feudal regim e did not fall for ignoble reasons: it w as w orn
out, it w as violently attacked and it was insupportable. T he nobles felt this.
A few generous souls sought the glory o f giving it the final blow ; m ost
offered their rights to the holocaust in order to save their lands and their
p erson s.” And, now , utterly denying any irrationality in the central drama,
he adds: “ If there was any unreason or m adness it w as not in abolishing a
rotten and odious institution. . . but in giving Louis XVI, for an initiative he
had nothing to do w ith and which m ust have disgusted him, the title o f
‘restorer o f French Liberty’ . ”*
T h e m om entary solidarity found by the legislators (for som e m ore than
m om entary) and ¿he sen se o f rising to m eet the fearsom e challenges around
them m ade the night o f August 4 a sort o f elite counterpart to the G reat
Fear, com plete with rum ors o f a p lo t5 7 In this case the notion o f a plot w as
6
had I opposed the general «iah of the nation. It would have been to designate you, you and your
possessions, as victims of the rage of the multitude; it would have been to expose you to seeing
your homes set on fire. The nobles who went along with these sacrifices are losing as much and
more than you... . Be assured that our little baflbage, until now, is the one that has suffered the
least troubles and misfortunes. I dare say that I have tried, through accommodation and prudence,
to avoid compromising you. I, therefore, pray that the nobOity does not show any regret at the
giveaway that has just taken place, that they find no fault publicly with the decree of the National
Assembly, and that they show in their speech a prudence, a circumspection on which their own
peace depends (and perhaps also the general well-being of the Kingdom).” See Charies-Ehe de
Ferrières, Correspondence médite (1789,1790,1791) (Paris: Armand Cotin, 1932), 116-17.
5. Like the duke du Châtelet, who, noticing the bishop of Chartres calling for an abandonment
of hunting rights, formed and acted on the wish to go after ecclesiastical payments. (“So, he takes
away our hunting; I’m going to take away his tithes,” the duke is said to have commented to his
neighbors; a bit later he took the floor and made good on his threat.) See Kessel, La mâtdu4 août,
154-56; andJean-Baptiste Greifet de Beauregard, “Lettres de M. Greifet de Beauregard," Société
des sciences naturelles et archéologiques de la Creuse (1899): 78.
6. Antoine-Claire Thibaudèau, Mémoires, 1765-1792 (Paris: Champion, 1875), 94-96.
7. At least one deputy speculated that rural insurrection and legislative breakthrough might
have been engineered by the same cabal. Recalling August 4, Bertrand Barère observed: “The
burning of the châteaux had preceded that day, in the same way that the fear of brigands that was
widespread in Paris and the provinces since July 12 caused the organization of the National Guard.
. . . FDnever forget the general commotion at Versailles caused by the news of the châteaux in
flames.. . . Was the movement caused by the same hand. . . ? Wasn’t it a swiftly diffused plan for
the formation of the National Guards, conceived by the same mindor by the same party that needed
quite accurate. T he B reton Chib— the organization form ing around d ie

hotheads o f the Third E state o f Brittany— had planned a great drama in
which the duke d’Aiguillon, one o f the w ealthiest o f lords, would declare for
an indem nified phasing-out o f seigneurial dues. In the heightened clim ate o f
tension and hope in and around the National A ssem bly, the script was
rew ritten on the spot as viscount de N oailles, not assigned a part, so it
appears, but knowing what w as up, jum ped the gun on Aiguillon with the far
m ore open-ended and subversive proposal that som e seigneurial rights be
abolished w ithout com pensation, while others be subject to indem nification.*8
For the next w eek the deputies debated a d ecree to sum m arize the
tum ultuous evening, a w eek during which it was clear that som e, especially
am ong the clergy, had already backed off. T he final docum ent adopted
on August 11 retained the critical distinction o f outright abolition versus
com pensation, a distinction that structured all subsequent debate and action
ov er the next four years o f struggle.
W hile the journals and letters o f the deputies testify to various m ixes o f
im pulsive gen erosity and careful calculation, o f exaltation, fear, and cynicism
am ong the full group o f participants, the precise m ix o f m otives am ong the
insiders in the B reton Club’s catalytic initiative rem ains a m atter o f con jec
ture. The m ost plausible gu ess stresses an attem pt to save as m uch as one
could through a dram atic gesture o f renunciation o f what couldn’t be saved;
the pain o f that renunciation, m oreover, w as to be generously com pensated.
In the event, the scenario planned at the B reton Club was buried under the
respon se it triggered.
A great deal has been w ritten on the w ays in w hich the revolutionary
regim e attem pted to default on the prom ise those w ords seem ed to em body:
on how peasants w ere to be perm itted to em ancipate them selves from som e
o f their m ajor burdens only upon the paym ent o f an indem nity few could
afford, on how the revolutionary governm ent itself attem pted to collect
seigneurial dues attached to the form er lands o f church or king (w hich w ere
now adm inistered by the new regim e), on how slow w as the Paris govern
m ent to com e to term s with the sheer m assive refusal o f the countryside to
continue to pay.9
the events to justify extraordinary legislative measures?” See Bertrand Barère, Mémoires (Paris:
Labitte, 1842), 1:269.
8. It is possible that NoaiDes was part of a second group collectively pushing anagenda different
from that proposed by those around Aiguillon—different and far less conservative. See Kessel, La
nuüdu 4 août, 127-32.
9. Henri Doniol, La Révolutionfrançaise et laféodalité (Paris: Gufflaumin, 1876); Ende Chénon,
Les démembrements de la propriété foncière en France avant et après la Révolution (Paris: Recueil
Sirey, 1923); Philippe Sagnac, La législation civile de la Révolutionfrançaise (Paris: Hachette, 1898);
Alphonse Aulard, La Révolution française et le régime féodal (Paris: Alcan, 1919); Marcel Garaud,
Histoire générale du droit privéfrançais, voL 2, La Révolution et la propriétéfoncière (Paris: Reçue!
Revolutionary P easants and Revolutionary Legislators 431
It m ight be convenient to take what w as decided on August 4 and in the

cou rse o f the next w eek as a baseline to assess the d egree to which
subsequent actions defaulted on a prom ise or fulfilled it T o do so, how ever,
m ay already b e attributing a hardness and solidity to what w as prom ised in
early August w hen this itself was subject to negotiation. K essel has amply
docum ented the degree to which even the participants differed about ju st
what had been decided. Som e, in good con scien ce, inform ed their constit
uents that feudal dues needed no longer be paid.10 O thers, in equally good
con scien ce, held the d ecree to have sharply restricted the rights that no
longer had to be honored and thereby to have invited good citizens to cease
their riotous behavior; w hile still others held that the enum eration o f rights
to be abolished thereby sanctioned the use o f force to en force those rights
not so enum erated.11 T he brief summary o f the discussion taken dow n in
the early hours o f August 5 w as a no doubt inevitably selective and
som etim es distorted rendering o f the general tenor o f the discu ssion ;12 the
final d ecree six days later w as not sim ply an elaboration, form alization, or
clarification o f the August 4 decision but in som e ways broke new ground
and in oth ers em bodied significant om issions.13 Som e o f the deputies
Sirey, 1958); Peter M. Jones, The Peasantry in the French Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge
10. On August 8, one clerical deputy wrote home that “we have suppressed the entire feudal
regime and the claims derived from it with a solemn decree”; see Kessel, La nuit du 4 août, 179.
11. Three deputies from Auvergne wrote home on August 5 that “one must hope that the people
will be moved by so much generosity and return to order.” Less inclined to hope the people would
be moved, the count d’Agoult wrote back to his base in Dauphiné urging the creation of a force to
“charge the brigands with bayonets and without mercy.” See Kessel, La nuit de 4 août, 178; Jean
Egret, La Révolution des notables: Maunieret les Monarchiens (Paris: Armand Colin, 1950), 105.
12. The summary speaks vaguely of “reforming” the guilds, for example, whereas the only dear
statements on the subject uttered in the course of the evening were probably proposals for clear-
cut abolition. Proposals voiced inthe evening for freedom of worship for non-Cathoëcs, for abolishing
the parlements, and for extending the emancipation of serfs to include colonial slaves seem to have
similarly gotten lost in the shuffle. (This last item was one of the few that aroused notable
disapproval It would take a slave revolt to match the peasant insurrection before the legislature
realty moved on slavery.) See Jean-Pierre Hirsch, La nuit du 4 août (Paris: GaDimard/JuIliard),
180-81; Kessel La nuit du 4 août, 157.169.
13. By the afternoon of August 5 a draft decree was drawn up; it was the basis for the final
decree enacted, after an article-by-article debate, on August 11. The August 5 draft has totally
dropped all reference to the guilds. On the other hand, it rounds out the previous evening’s
condemnation of rights over hunting pigeons and rabbits by adding fishing; it declares that
clerical stipends (portions congrues) are to be raised—an issue omitted in the previous evening’s
summary—and declares that the National Assembly be given an account of the current state of
government stipends to individuals. Kessel provides a convenient comparison of the summary
adopted at the end of the session of the fourth, the draft decree of the fifth, and the final text
adopted by the eleventh (Kessel La nuit du 4 août, 320-26). The confusion over the guilds led
Mathiez to devote an article to whether or not they were slated for abolition on August 4: Albert
Mathiez, "Les corporations ont-eDes été supprimées en principe dans la nuit du 4 août 1789?”
Annales Historiques de la Révolution Française 8 (1931): 252-57.
them selves seem ed sim ply baffled like the duke w ho C ondorcet recalled
having asked w hile laughing, “ But what have w e done? Is there anyone who
know s?” 14 Still others, less am used, felt that the confusion o f the debate
itself perm itted cabals to deliberately falsify the intentions o f the depu ties.15
The conservative count de Lally-Tolendal thought that many w ere confusing
the night o f August 4 itself with later d ecrees.16
It is, then, a bit m isleading to speak o f the statem ents o f August 4 -1 1 as
a prom ise later evaded. It seem s m ore fruitful to speak o f an angry struggle
in the m onths ahead over seigneurial rights in which one o f many battlefields
w as the m eaning to be assigned to the August d ecrees. The claim o f an
evaded prom ise w as an im portant w eapon for som e participants in this
struggle; other participants saw a prom ise being filled.
B y virtue o f their ow n sen se o f the portentiousness o f the even t, by
alm ost instantly fram ing the event with the stock phrase “ eternally cele
brated” (or som ething very sim ilar),17 by m oving to distribute their view s o f
the event and have their ow n participation, real, revised, or fictitious,
published and dissem inated, by term inating the event with the pledge o f a
m em orial to a king w ho had nothing to do w ith it, the deputies them selves
turned the event into a m yth w hose interpretation could be con tested even
before the final d ecree o f August 11 was accom plished. Som ething that is
already bom “ eternally celebrated” need not wait for the w ork o f deliberate
distortion, unconscious selection , m isunderstanding, oblivion, and tenden
tious reinterpretation o f the a g es.18
14. Jean-Antoine-Nicolas de Caritat, marquis de Condorcet, Mémoires de Condorcet sur la

Révolutionfrançaise (Paris: Fonthieu, 1924), 2:60.
15. Baron de GauviBe had a mixed reaction to the night of the fourth. Wide it was “more
drunkenness than discussion,’’ the drunkenness derived from "patriotism atone.” But the next day,
he notes bitterly, "everyone was quite astounded at the [summary]. I myself was first among them
upon hearing what had taken place last night—rather what they want to have taken place. Several
facts were obviously altered They had extended the abandonment of rights and men of good faith
could not recognize their actions in this account”; see Louis-Henri-Charies de Gauvüe, Journal du
baron de Gauvilk (Paris: Gay, 1864), 17-18.
16. “I have heard many complaints about these decrees. But it is not the night of August 4 which
must be the object of complaint, it is the extension given those decrees when they were fbrmaly
drawn up. I restricted myself to listening when it was a matter of subjects foreign to me, but I saw
clearly that there was a great difference between. . . the specific abolition of such-and-such a right
and the general abolition of the entire feudal regime, within which one might include everything";
ltaphime-Gérard, comte de Lally-Tolendal, Mémoire de RL le comte de Laüy-Tblendal ou seconde
lettre à ses commettons (Paris: Desenne, 1790), 113-14.
17. Jean-Pierre Boullé of the Third Estate of Ploèrmel, for example, uses the phrase “etemaly
memorable” in a letter he claims to be writing immediately after the meeting ends early on the 5th;
see “Ouverture des états généraux de 1789,” Revue de la Révolution 15 (1889): 23.
18. Alexandre Lameth remembered “the most laconic decree, yet at the same time the vastest
in its consequences that has ever been enacted on human affairs: Thefeudal régime is abolished."
See his Histoire de ÍAssemblée Constituante (Paris: Moutardier, 1828), 100.
W hat led the National A ssem bly not m erely to issue a statem ent on the
feudal regim e but to issue an eternally celebrated statem ent w hose p recise
im port w as to be debated, not m erely for m onths to com e, but even before
it had been issued? M arquis de F errières, noble deputy from Saumur, w rote
his w ife tow ard the end o f July to describe the considerations that w eighed
upon him as a legislator. On July 18 he w rote that “ the new s from the
provinces is even m ore alarming” than what is happening in Paris. H e
reassured his w ife that their ow n province rem ained peaceful, a state he has
endeavored to maintain by having Saumuris m ayor to dinner. N onetheless,
he goes on, “ T h ere is a universal insurrection against the N obility” ; it turns
out that by “ insurrection” here he refers, not to peasant revolt, but to the
clim ate in the National A ssem bly w here short-sighted deputies “don’t imag
ine that they them selves shall be the victim s o f the uprisings they in cite.”
From here his train o f thought strays easily to several nearby sites o f
popular disturbance; this in turn leads him to rem ind his w ife o f how to
repair their ow n m oats. A s for the actual w ork o f the A ssem bly, the main
task m entioned is the Constitution, view ed w ith considerable skepticism
(“ I’m afraid that w e are making it so beautiful, so sublim e, that it will only
look good in book s, w hile in reality it will apply to nothing” ). And, explaining
his low profile in drafting that docum ent, he defines a noble stance in term s
that unself-consdou sly inverts that proposed by Sieyès for the Third E state:
“ I’m nothing and don’t want to be anything: that’s the only prudent cou rse
under the circum stances.” 19
The next day he w rites again, even m ore im pressed by the “ universal
m adness, the frantic delirium .” H e praises his w ife’s better judgm ent in not
refilling the m oats, an act that m ight arouse too m uch attention: “ T h ey
would im agine that I want to defend m yself.” (“ T hey” have a pow erful hold
on the m arquis’ thoughts.)20 H e adds the advice to hire as few hands fo r the
harvest as possible, and preferably dom estic servants or known m en from
nearby. In the next few days, advising his w ife on how to p rotect som e
m oney, furnishings, and essential legal docum ents, he exp resses a sense o f
the discrim inating nature o f the current violen ce: “ if they com e to M arsay,
I don’t think it will be to bum the château— w e’re too weD liked— but to bum
the docum ents which deal with rents and d u es.” And he again counsels
prudent behavior; it is hard to say here if he is advising his w ife how to act
in the countryside or explaining his ow n conduct in the National A ssem bly:
19. Ferrières, Correspondance, 99-103. Few deputies would have been unaware of the dramatic
opening of the most famous of all the many pamphlets of the convocation period; “1. What is the
Third Estate—e v e r y t h in g . 2. What has it been in the political order until now? n o t h in g . 3. What
does it ask? t o b e s o m e t h in g . ” See Emmanuel Sieyès, Qu'est-ce que le Tiers état? (Geneva: Droz,
1970), 119.
20. “They” are major players for manyatthe other deputies as welL See the passage frombaron
de GauviBe quoted above in note 15.
“ T he conduct one m ust adhere to is to say that everything is fine, that the
N obility and Com m ons are in p erfect agreem ent” (and he adds that one
m ust now avoid the expression, “ Third E sta te").21
O ther deputies report their ow n distinct experien ces. Sylvain BaiUy's
Memoirs, probably w ritten dow n in 1792, suggest a particular sensitivity
during July to subsistence disturbances. W hen he recalls the rum ors o f the
G reat Fear, for exam ple, this Third E state deputy from Paris recalls the
tales o f bandits cutting unripe grain22 (perhaps filtered through his own
period o f responsibility for subsistence as first m ayor o f revolutionary Paris).
Baron de G auville, stopping on July 27 at his property near Dourdan, w hose
nobles had chosen him deputy, recalls that peasants “ even from m y ow n
village” w ere only restrained by a rum or that the baron w as accom panied by
a com pany o f dragoons. Fortified, so the baron recalls, by his belief that
“ the grum bling o f the people usually am ounts to nothing when an innocent
man appears” he passed unarmed and unharmed through the crow d. Adding
to the rom antic self-portrait the baron recalls riding o ff in “ an awful rain
storm .” F resh from his encounter with the threatening country people at
hom e, the baron inform s us that the very first thing he voted for on his
return to the National A ssem bly was a reorganization o f the A ssem bly’s
guard.23 (O ne w onders at how to take a narrative sequence in which the
dem onstration that innocence is an adequate shield from plebeian violen ce is
follow ed by strengthening the A ssem bly’s d efen ses.) For Emmanuel Bar-
botin, a country priest sent to Versailles by his colleagues from Hainaut, the
rural upheaval increased the pains o f public service. He w rites at the end o f
August that with taxes uncollectible, the governm ent w as not paying the
deputies their exp ected allow ance.24
For the m arquis de Lézay-M am ésia, election as deputy o f Aval in Franche-
C om té m ay have seem ed an opportunity to participate in realizing the idyllic
reform s he had envisioned in his poetry and other w riting on rural them es.
Recalling his happy country childhood spent with a friend (“ a little peasant o f
the sam e age as m yself” ) he dream ed, after a m ilitary career o f tw enty-tw o
years, “ o f exchanging m y sw ord for a spade.” In the 1780s, he published
Happiness in the Countryside, extolling the potential o f rustic life but
denouncing the injustice o f the tax system and the irresponsibility o f the
nobility, both, in his view , sou rces o f rural poverty. T he m arquis seem s to
have given up his ow n claim to peasant labor on his land and he w rote o f his
responsibility to his peasant neighbors. Although, like m ost o f his noble
neighbors w ho held serfs, he did not rise to the king’s invitation to voluntary
21. Ferrières, Correspondance, 103-7; 109-13.

22. BaiOy, Mémoires. 2:160.
23. Gauville, Journal, 13-15.
24. Emmanuel Barbotin, Lettres de l’abbé Barbolin, député à l’Assemblée constituante (Paris:
Edouard Comély, 1910), 58.
em ancipation in 1779 (see Chapter 9, pp. 549), he was quick to d o so when

a small group, com posed o f serfs and law yers, presented a docum ent to the
three estates assem bled for the elections o f 1789.25 A m onth after the
August d ecrees, Lézay-M am ésia saw a France “ absolutely disorganized,
given over to the m ost horrible anarchy.” And defending the plan to em igrate
that he says he shares with eleven oth er deputies, he asks, “ H ow can one
rem ain in the m idst o f a people w ho, out o f their lack o f understanding, their
friv o lity . . . have becom e the cru elest people, the m ost coldly terrib le.” 26
And so the m arquis em igrates, still traveling tow ard a land o f peace governed
by an enlightened elite, which, now , he realizes, lies across the Atlantic.
T he com m on elem ent in these tales in letters, journals, and m em oirs o f
th ose w ho sat in the National A ssem bly is the sense o f m enace that hung
over them in personal w ays— as property holders, as residents o f particular
locales, as holders o f particular positions on public issu es. T he great w ork
o f the Constituent A ssem bly and their personal fortune, their political future,
and their physical security w ere, for the m om ent, inseparable and what
m ade them inseparable was the m obilization o f ordinary people. W hat
happened in the legislature and what happened in the village w ere now
m anifestly intertw ined. Thus the m arquis de F errières oscillates betw een
considering his fam ily in the dangerous countryside and thinking about the
A ssem bly, u ses “ insurrection” to describe the anti-noble animus o f the
deputies o f the Third E state as w ell as popular m obilization, and praises
prudence equally w hen advising his w ife on talking politics back in Saumur
or explaining how he cop es with the radical elem ent in the assem bly. Thus
the baron de Gauville goes from his experience o f peasant m ilitance at hom e
(“ even in m y ow n village”) to concern about guarding A ssem bly and king.
O r consider the abbé Barbotin, w hose early letters show him to be
sym pathetic to reform and anim ated by considerable distrust o f the clerical
hierarchy and nobility. For him, the A ssem bly’s assault on the tithe m arks a
turning point— he is a tithe-holder him self— beyond w hich his view s shift
m arkedly to the right. B oth insurrectionary peasants and the A ssem bly’s
left are joined togeth er in a com m on “ id iocy.”27
N ow consider the effect on the deputies as a collectivity o f this sudden
25. Charles-Louis Chassin, L'égiise et Us demurs serfs (Paris: Dentu, 1880), 151-53. During the
pamphlet wars of the late 1780s local Third Estate activists included the marquis among the noble
defenders of “the people” and called on their less enlightened feOow nobles to emulate them; see
jean Egret, "La Révolution aristocratique en Franche-Comté et son échec (1788-1789)," Revue
dHistoire Moderne et Contemporaine 1 (1954): 252.
26. Elisabeth Bourget-Besnier, UnefamilU française sous la Révolution et FEmpire: La famiUe
deLézay-Mamésia (Paris: Bourget-Besnier, 1985), 15,16,18,19, 25.
27. “Our peasant idiots think they will gain greatly in no longer paying the tithes” and “most
members of the Assembly begin to regret the idiocies of the night of the fourth” (Barbotin, Lettres,
52.59.)
accum ulation o f experience. Figure 8 .1 show s the day-by-day detail o f how

many bailliages experienced insurrection during that first dram atic sum m er
o f revolution.28 On July 27, the electoral circum scriptions that sent som e
sixty-six delegations to the E states-G eneral w ere experiencing incidents
o f panic, o r assaults chi seigneurial rights, or seizures o f transported grain,
and so on. T he arrival o f new s at Versailles, how ever, w as not instanta
neous. In the norm al cou rse o f even ts, mail would take about tw o days to
arrive from Rouen, three from Tours, four from Strasbourg or Lyon, six
from Bordeaux, eight from M arseille, eleven from M auléon.29 From village
France, one would have to add the travel tim e to the nearest tow n on a
good road. On the other hand, new s o f the greatest significance m ight
circulate rather m ore rapidly— it m ight be w orth it to w ear out the horses.
(W e know som ething, for exam ple, o f the rapidity w ith which the new s
spread o f the king’s flight to Varennes30 or o f the rapid spread o f the
G reat F ear.)31
W ere the deputies in touch with their regions? T he answ er is not quite
obvious since there are many elem ents o f the revolutionary situation that
m ight plausibly have m ade such contact pointless. The constituent-delegate
relationship w as far from institutionalized in a country with no tradition o f
regular election s. M any French theorists o f representation, m oreover,
denied that a deputy represented a constituency, prom oting an ideological
clim ate that m ight have discouraged som e from assum ing such a ro le .32 (A
w idespread view was that a deputy represented the entire nation.) T here
w as, m oreover, no reason to exp ect a second run for office, w hich would
generate a need for feedback from those one hoped to please (and, in the
event, the Constituent A ssem bly ultim ately d ecreed its ow n m em bers
ineligible to stand for election to the Legislative A ssem bly). Finally, for the
noble deputies specifically, som e 40% w ere not even norm ally resident in
the district they represented, having managed to get elected w here their
fam ilies held property, although living in P aris.33 N onetheless, the solidari-
28. This figure has roughly the same shape, but differs conceptually from Figure 6.5, which
presented the rise and fall in the number of insurrectionary events.
29. Guy ArbeDot and Bernard Lepetit. Atlas de la Révolution française, voL 1, Routes et
communications (Paris: Editions de l’Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, 1987), 41.
30. Ibid., 71.
31. Georges Lefebvre, La GrandePeur de 1789 (Paris: Armand Colin, 1970).
32. Ina valuable overview of current conceptions of representation, Patrice Gueniffey points out
that Condorcet was even offended at the notion that deputies “ought to vote not according to
reason and justice, but following the interests of their constituents.” See Patrice Gueniffey, “Les
assemblées et la représentation,” in Colin Lucas, ed., The French Revolution and the Creation of
Modem Political Culture, voL 2, The Political Culture of the French Revolution (Oxford: Fergamoo
Press. 1988), 233-57.
33. See Timothy Tackett, “Nobles and Third Estate in the Revolutionary Dynamicof the National
Assembly, 179^1790," American HistoricalReview 94 (1989): 276.
Event takes place
“ i------------------------------------------------------1----------------1--------------1----------------------------------------- 1 -
July 1 July 27 Aug 4 Aug 11 August 31
Fig. 8.1 Bailliages with Insurrections, July-August 1789
ties forged in the cou rse o f the convening o f the E states-G eneral appear
to have them selves created a sufficient sen se o f interdependence and
responsibility that even prior to the d ea r expectation o f a regularized
politics, many deputies plainly m ade a practice o f regular reports to those
w ho elected them and, in turn, received reports from hom e.34
W hen did such reports arrive? The broken line in Figure 8.1 is an estim ate
o f the num ber o f bailliages w hose deputies received, each day in July and
August, new s that a new insurrection had erupted.35 Our best gu ess, then,
is that the rising w ave o f rural insurrection m eant that by the earlier part o f
34. Timothy Tackett, “Les constituants et leurs commettants," paper presented to the Congrès
Mondial pour le Bicentenaire de la Révolution Française, Paris, 1989. The letters to family or
constituants of deputies frequently showed a special concern for local issues, although hardly to the
exclusion of a national focus. These letters make obvious that many deputies were both oriented to
broad, abstract principles, and sensitive to local interests.
35. The time it normally took for news to get from various towns to Paris was taken from the
detailed maps of ArbeOot and Lepetit, Routes et Communications. On the assumption that it might
take an extra day, more or less, for events in villages to get to towns on the nqjor roads, I added
one to the length of time for news to travel from the msyor dty of a bailliage to Paris with the
exception of bailliages whose major town was itself within a day’s travel from Paris. In these latter
instances, I assumed that news could travel about as easily from the village to Paris directly as it
could via an intermediary town.
July, every day, the delegations o f one or tw o bailliages w ere hearing about
deep and disturbing troubles at hom e. T h ese delegations w ere generally
som e variable num ber o f “ deputations” (each deputation consisting o f one
cleric, on e noble, and tw o representatives o f the Third) plus a variable
num ber o f alternates.36 N ot only was there no letup, but from mid-July on
the tem po o f such new s began to mount rapidly, peaking around July 28
(this is only an estim ate, after all), but rem aining at quite a high level fo r the
next w eek or s o .37 A t eight in the m orning o f August 4, for exam ple, m ost
o f the deputies from Dauphiné w ere gathered for a reading o f letters from
hom e urging sw ift action since “ the disorders already com m itted are less
frightening than those that som e are trying to com m it”38 T h ese deputies
had already been through quite a lo t through utterly unique experien ces, in
fa ct T h ey had experienced an election unique in their lifetim e. T h ey had
seen their excitem ent at participating in the renew al o f France give w ay as
M ay and June dragged on to the tense tedium o f paralysis as the Third could
not agree with the others on w hether to do business as one body or three.
T he Third E state in late June, along with the like-m inded am ong the d erg y
and a sm aller num ber o f nobles, had managed to defy the king and, in their
ow n m inds, overturn all o f French history by declaring them selves the
representatives o f the French nation; they had faced dow n the refusal o f the
king and the privileged orders to g o along and far from being arrested had
been saved by the m iraculous intervention o f the Parisians on July 14. T h ose
w ho had not gone along with the National A ssem bly faced the equally
unprecedented experience o f being ordered to do so by Louis on June 27.
(That’s what sent nobles like the baron de Gauville back to their constituen
cies in late July to ask for an extension o f their pow ers so as to honorably
com ply with the king’s new ord er.)
This, then, w as the body that from mid-July on w as experiencing, with
every day’s new s, m ounting evidence o f a country in ch aos.39 Pious horta
tory calls to order resounded, rather feebly, to be su re;40 so did calls for
discipline, stem m easures, and the lik e.41 On the hypothesis o f a united elite
36. Of course there were exceptions of which the most important were the Breton delegations
that were boycotted by the nobles.
37. Why is the delay between event and news so slight? Recall how many events in the summer
of 1789 took place in northern France (see Tables 7.5 and 7.6); and note that the electoral
procedures produced disproportionate numbers of northern deputies.
38. Jean Egret, La Révolution des notables, 105.
39. "Anarchy” is the usual word used in the letters, diaries, and memoirs of the deputies.
40. See, for example, the declaration that Target, opening the evening session on August 4,
proposed to distribute to every parish priest (AP 8:343).
41. For example, the deputy who on August 3, fearing a “war of the poor against the rich” wide
the shortfall in tax revenues mounted, proposed a tough crackdown on those who did not pay taxes,
apparently attempting to be sure the poor paid up. The transcript adds that this project went
nowhere (AP 8:336).
in com m and o f a loyal arm y one m ight w ell im agine the possibility o f a
consistent strategy o f repression. But the elite w as far from united, as the
m arquis de F errières noted; and the arm y’s behavior w as not sim ple
eith er.42 An im portant group within the National A ssem bly w ished to avoid
any concentrated deploym ent o f m ilitary force on the likelihood that the first
target o f any revived capacity for centrally coordinated coercion w ould be
them selves.43 We have seen that the cahiers show the Third E state— a w ord
out o f fashion by late July according to the m arquis, always concern ed with
keeping a low profile44— to have been tending by M arch tow ard em bracing
the indem nification option, although with a significant abolitionist com ponent
(se e Chapter 3 ). T he nobility, on the other hand, tended to keep its ow n
counsel by avoiding m uch com m ent; but the m ore vocal portion o f the
nobility included a significant com ponent opting for integral m aintenance o f
th ese seigneurial rights on which they ch ose to take a stand; w hile still other
nobles proposed a variety o f reform s (w hich, how ever, differed from those
reform s proposed by an equally w eighty group within the Third E state; see
Chapter 2, p. 56 and Chapter 3, pp. 67, 126). L et us not underplay the
im portance o f the king him self having abolished serfdom on royal lands in
1779.45 The significance o f this is not so m uch that the king w as m uch o f an
ally to antiseigneurial forces, but that prior to his response to the night o f
August 4, th ose w ho w ished to think o f the king as an ally had a past action
cm which to pin their present hopes.
It would not be quite apt to say that the peasants, as the French put it,
w ere kicking in an open door. But it certainly w as not a secu rely closed and
zealously defended one. It w as already partly open, w ith a variety o f
guardians pulling and tugging in various directions and in the p rocess,
shoving each oth er a good d ea l A very significant num ber o f those guard
ians, indeed, w ere proposing to open the d oor further, if vastly m ore slow ly
and cautiously than the besiegers w ished. It w as hardly a group prepared, as
42. Samuel Scott shows the division within the army and its consequent inconsistent behavior
faced with politicized urban crowds. See Samuel F. Scott, The Response of the Royal Army to the
French Revolution: The Role and Development <4 the Line Army, 1787-1793 (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1978).
43. One can trace many of the themes mentioned here in the debates around the proposals of
LaBy-Tolendal, noble deputy of Paris, on July 20 and July 23, to recall France to order and
reinvigorate repressive mechanisms; see AP 8:252-55, 263-66; Jean-Joseph Mounier, "Exposé de
ma conduite dans l'Assemblée Nationale,” in François Furet and Ran Halévi, eds., Orateurs de la
Révolutionfrançaise, voL 1, Les constituants (Paris: Gallimard, 1989), 922-23.
44. Ferrières, Correspondance, 104. Word fashions changed fast Adrien Duquesnoy, Third
Estate deputy from Bar-le-Duc, complained in his journal for May 22 about hideous neologisms
borrowed from English like "motion,” "amendment” "commons”—as in "House of”—that every
body suddenly seemed to be using. A couple of weeks later Ms own writing is full of these terms,
used quite unself-consdously. SeeJournal <fAdrien Duquesnoy (Paris: Picard, 1894), 1:35.
45. Alphonse Aulard, La Révolutionfrançaise et le régimeféodal (Paris: Alcan, 1919), 13-36.
the m arquis de F errières thought the only reasonable cou rse, to cooperate in
shutting the d oor against a com m on enem y.46 T he divisions within the
legislature provided one significant elem ent o f opportunity for peasant
action against seigneurial rights to su cceed, particularly on ce a part o f the
legislature found in the rural threat a useful opportunity to push its ow n
program . But other elem ents o f the A ssem bly's situation helped enlarge the
likelihood o f peasant su ccess: the evident need to reestablish taxation on a
sound footin g opened the possibility o f a tacit deal in which the ending o f
one exaction would b e traded for a renew ed com pliance with the other; the
urban upheaval o f mid-July added m ightily to the pressures on the govern
m ent for change; and the central experiences o f the deputies from mid-June
(Hi filled them w ith exaltation or despair as they thought they discovered
that they w ere at the cen ter o f a m om entous tim e when French history
could be overturned.
Yet the resistances w ere real, too. A portion o f the National A ssem bly,
after all, w as m ade up o f recalcitrant nobles w hose constituents w ere dead
set against change in the seigneurial system .474 8W hile the noble cahiers, w e
saw, are at least as notew orthy for their silence as their intransigeance
when it cam e to seigneurial rights, one could hardly exp ect that silence,
when it had to speak in the National A ssem bly, to be transm uted into a
radical abolitionism .46 W hile many Third E state assem blies, to recall Chapter
3, had an antiseigneurial program , they differed notably from the countryside
in their lesser advocacy for uncom pensated abolition (see p. 88). T h ere was
a considerable group in the A ssem bly w ho did not want to g o an inch beyond
indem nification.49
Still others thought the claim s o f order w ere m ore im portant than any
46. “Among the deputies of the Conrans, there are those who hate us without knowing why
. . . (T]he people, who they arouse against us, shall fall with even more force against themselves"
(Ferrières, Correspondance, 100).
47. Rivarol called August 4 “the Saint-Bartholomew’s Massacre of property” (Lácretele, Histoin
de la France, 7:147).
48. If, with IboqueviDe, ooe sees nobles as harboring conservative tendencies on their own little
spot of concerns, and presumes that those in the process of ennoblement (generally by virtue of
their occupancy of offices that grant nobOity after a given time) eagerly anticipate having access to
that spot, it is worth noting that of the 1,315 men who ever sat in the National Assembly 429 were
either nobles or on the path of ennoblement. (This number includes nobles chosen by Third Estate
assemblies.) See Edna Hindie Lemay, “Les révélations d'un dictionnaire: du nouveau sur la
composition de l’Assemblée Nationale Constituante (1789-1791),“ AnnalesHistoriques de la Révolu
tion Française, no. 284 (1991): 162.
49. Not only did AiguiUon’s would-be opening statement only propose indemnification—making
no mention whatsoever of the outright abolition of any rights—but the legislation eventually drafted
by the Committee on Feudal Rights, the speeches of Merlin and, generally, the central trend in the
legislative rhetoric until winter 1792 insisted that rights be honored until indemnification. For
example, on June 15, 1791, Merlin insisted that “the most imperious justice forced [the Assembly]
to maintain [seigneurial rights] until indemnification” (4P 27:242).
decision on the seigneurial regim e and the daim s o f order, at the m om ent,
called for standing firm on substance and using force. R epressive m easures
w ere rarely far from the thoughts o f som e legislators w henever they turned
to the peasant question. On August 3, 1789, the A ssem bly discussed a
hortatory proposal for enforcem ent o f laws that carried an im plicit threat o f
force. In the ensuing debate (Hie deputy wanted the m ore explicit language
o f “ under penalty o f extraordinary prosecution and punishm ent according to
the rigor o f the ordinances,” a euphem ism for execution. A w eek later, the
assem bly took a break from w orking on the abolition o f feudalism to discuss
and pass a very detailed proposal o f Target giving local governm ent the
authority to call in the new National Guards, the old rural police, and even
the arm y. (T h ere was also to be a list prepared o f unem ployed and
vagabonds in case, one presum es, som eone in authority w ished to round up
the usual su sp ects.) Soldiers w ere to be required to sw ear an oath “betw een
the hands o f their com m ander” — rem arkably feudal language for an assem bly
abolishing feudalism 50— to keep peace and oppose troublem akers. (N oailles
objected to this provision, which he held prem ature.) This stiffening o f the
coerciv e apparatus was to be sent out together with the final form o f the
reform d ecree, enacted the next day CAP 8 :3 3 6 -3 7 , 3 7 8 -7 9 ). (O thers, o f
cou rse, sim ilarly placing claim s o f order over the fate o f seigneurial rights,
opted fo r a conciliatory strategy.)51
L ocal officials and local holders o f seigneurial rights, m oreover, in the
clim ate o f breakdow n o f authority, m ight w ell attem pt to pursue their ow n
p olicies, either m ore conciliatory or m ore repressive than the centrally
dictated decision o f the m om ent (a considerable com plication throughout the
entire history o f revolutionary legislation on these rights). T h e rep ort on
conditions in the département o f L ot, prepared by tw o com m issioners sent
50. On vassal homage, see Marc Bloch, Feudal Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1961), 1:145-46.
51. BaiDy, for example, explaining the rationale behind actions taken to appease a crowd of
Parisians anxious about a shipment of gunpowder on August 8, seems to sum up his resigned view
of how all policy had to be made: “one had to go along; at that time general principles and standard
procedures were nothingandtranquility was everything” (Mémoires, 1:224). Summingupthe actions
oí the “eternally celebrated” night he writes: “ADthe propositions were piled up precipitously; not
all were decreed and several were decreed too soon. The result was a weakening of all bonds and a
crumbling of aDlines of authority; our minds didn’t grasp the limits of the good we were attempting,
these Emits were extended by our imaginations and our self-interest and we destroyed everything
at once, even what we wished to preserve. During my own administration [as mayor of Paris) that
night cost me many problems and many embarrassments. Nonetheless, aDthose decisions were
useful and even necessary. It was the moment for relieving the people of the countryside, almost
always or at least for a very long time forgotten. It probably would have been prudent to proceed
more slowly and precisely; prudence would have waited until we knew the state of the finances, the
extent of the debt and of our resources. But it was necessary to assure the survival of the revolution
and to establish the new order of things, and for that, there was only one sure means—winning the
support of the people” (2:217-18).
out by the National A ssem bly to investigate the sou rces o f insurrection
there, is a goldm ine o f inform ation on the significance o f such local initiatives.
In N ovem ber 1790, according to their report, the district officials o f
G ourdon, unim pressed “ with the gentle path” decided to call out the troops
to tear dow n the m aypoles that had sprouted everyw here in frightening
num bers. T he com m issioners sifted several rival explanations fo r peasant
rebellion; they concluded that it w as the battle o f the m aypoles that was the
im m ediate sou rce o f the insurrection (4 P 25:291, 2 9 7 -3 0 1 ). The panicky
overreaction o f district officials that aim ed at suppressing outw ard signs o f
defiance w ent w ell beyond a m ore cautious approach endorsed by the
National A ssem bly and follow ed at the département leveL This local over
zealousness to suppress insurrection, in the com m issioners’ view , was
actually insurrection’s m ajor cause. N earby, around Cahors and Lauzerte,
an even m ore violent and tenacious insurrectionary w ave w as also, the
report contends, fundam entally reactive: this tim e it w as not soldiers under
the orders o f local officials but arm ed bands o f “ gentlem en” w ho w ere the
provocation. T h ese ex-lord s, to be sure, claim ed to have only engaged in
defensive action in the face o f châteaux burnings, but the report, sifting the
eviden ce, finds a pattern o f antipeasant terrorism , w hich the peasants w ere
m ore than able to repay in kind (4 P 2 5 :3 0 1 -5 ).
The upshot w as that for all the opportunity the Revolution now presented
to rural m ilitance, that opportunity w as still fraught w ith considerable risks.
Local m ilitary authorities, local police authorities, local judicial authorities,
supported by a fluctuating group o f legislators and officials at the cen ter, and
som etim es even w orking in parallel w ith self-defen se forces o f local ex
lords, continued, interm ittently, to attack, arrest, prosecu te, and execu te
peasant insurrectionaries. O ther local officials, taking quite the opposite
tack, subverted central policies by arriving at their ow n accom m odations
with the peasants (w ho w ere m uch closer to them than to the legislators in
P aris).52 The revolutionary clim ate w as m ore favorable to rural action than
ever before: the door w as partly open and there w ere insiders w ho wanted
it opened further. But peasants w ho took action still ran serious risks;
som e d ied .53
Arthur Young had ju st crossed the Alps into France and w rote on
D ecem ber 2 5 ,1 7 8 9 :
52. See Merlin’s complaints during the insurrectionary minispurt of June 1791 about “certain
administrative bodies” that display “carelessness and weakness that multiply refusals to pay”
(4P 27:239).
53. While the Revolution’s bicentennial was marked by a renewed focus on the violence of the
Revolution, this seems rather generally to have meant a focus on the victims of crowd violence or
victims of the Terror. Peasants shot, hung, and broken on the wheel in that first summer
Guillotin’s machine had not yet been adopted—for hunting, invading fields, and taking food from the
lord’s stocks seem, as ever, so many incidental details.
This is the m ost advantageous entrance into France in resp ect o f

beauty o f country. From Spain, England, Flanders, Germ any or Italy
by way o f A ntibes, aU are inferior to this. It is really beautiful and
w ell planted, has many enclosures and m ulberries, with som e vines.
T h ere is hardly a bad feature excep t the h o u s e s . . . [w hich have] an
air o f poverty and m isery about them . . . . For ten or tw elve days
past they have had, mi this side o f the A lps, fine open warm w eather
with sunshine.. . . N ot far from VerpiHere pass the burnt château o f
M . d e Veau, in a fine situation, w ith a noble w ood behind it M r.
Grundy was here in A u gu st and it had then but lately been laid in
ashes; and a peasant w as hanging on one o f the trees o f the avenue
by the road, one am ong many w ho w ere seized by the milice
bourgeoise for this atrocious a c t 54
B y August 4 ,1 7 8 9 , our data su g g est the rural upheaval had settled dow n
considerably in com parison to the previous w eek, although the level o f
turbulence rem ained for a long, long tim e m arkedly above prerevolutionary
levels. If (Hie gives any creden ce at all to the estim ated delay in the new s
arriving at the National A ssem bly, how ever, Figure 8.1 show s that things
probably still appeared quite critical to the deputies on August 4 and for a
num ber o f days thereafter. W hile the actual occu rren ce o f incidents peaked
sharply at som e 66 insurrectionary bailliages on July 27, it is not until August
8 that the num ber o f delegations that m ight w ell have been hearing o f new
troubles each day fell below 20; and not until August 13 did they fall below
10 (for the first tim e in m ore than three w eeks).
T h ere is m uch to ponder here. C onsider, for one, the effect on the
legislators. N o soon er did they com plete their legislative w ork on the
eleventh than the countryside, alm ost instantly, subsided into som ething
which if not quite peace was at least far less dram atically threatening than
for a long several w eeks. Their ow n w ords m ust have seem ed to p ossess
m agical pow ers. T he sense o f bafflem ent and betrayal with which som e
deputies (like M erlin de Douai in his speech o f June 15, 1791)55 reacted to
renew ed w aves o f rural revolt becom es m ore understandable— and seem s
m ore from the heart, less cynically calculated then if w e m iss this sensation
o f having really achieved som ething on the m agical fourth o f August, with
54. Arthur Young, Travels m France and Italy During the Years 1787, 1788 and 1789 (London:
I M Dent, 1915). 303-4.
55. Merlin speaks of the session of August 4 as having fulfilled "one of the most important
missions” ever assigned by “the sovereign will of the French nation.” The elaborations of the initial
enactment "by the decree of March 15, 1790 seemed to compelí a reestablishment of tranquility in
the countryside.” He then goes on in considerable detail to express his dismay at peasant
misunderstanding, in which they are assisted by counterrevolutionaries as wel as weak andcareless
local administrators (AP 27:238-42).
only the details to be filled in. Part o f the dynam ic o f the unraveling o f this
confidence w as that the rural rejection o f the self-proclaim ed total abolition
o f feudalism w as faced by legislators w ho w ere by no m eans united on the
m eaning o f the grand d ecree o f August 4 -1 1 and w ho differed, m oreover,
on how they reacted to what they thought it m eant
It is striking that it is in the rem aining w eeks o f August that the sen se o f
polarization in the A ssem bly grew apace.56 Tim othy Tackett has recently
show n that the A ssem bly’s right, largely com posed o f nobility and clergy,
regrouped and recovered considerable ground, as show n by the suddenly
conservative nature o f the presiding officers, chosen by election at fort
nightly intervals.57 T h ose lords who had m erely gone along with the events
o f August 4, feeling it unsafe to fight the legislative tide particularly when
joined to a m obilized peasantry (like the m arquis de F errières)58 o r w ho had
felt that under the insurrectionary circum stances in the countryside one
m ight as w ell con cede what could not be defended (like the count de
V irieu)5®had plenty o f opportunity to support a detailed interpretation o f the
abolition o f feudalism that would abolish as little as p ossible.60 A substantial
num ber o f clerical deputies, m oreover, had already refused to ju st go along
quietly (let alone with the feigned enthusiasm recom m ended to holders o f
losing positions by the marquis de F errières) as the notion o f an indem nified
56. A sense of a bipolar drvñtoa among the deputies began to emerge both within the Assembly
itself and amongjournalistic observers during the debates in the days following August 4 and grew
sharper as that month went by. By the month’s end, the sense of a wed-defined right had dearly
crystallized (although the press did not use the terms “left” and “right” widely before the end of the
year). See Tackett, “Nobles and Third Estate,” 285-89; Pierre Rétat, “Partis et factions en 1789;
émergence des désignants politiques," Mots 16 (1988): 69-89.
57. Ihdcett, “Nobles and Third Estate,” 286.
58. In a letter to a fellow noble on August 7, the marquis goes through a variety of reasons for
supporting the “most memorable session in the history of any nation”: the new law wS show the
universe the generosity of the French; it wil deal with rural chaos; it creates national unity; it is
less injurious to the lords than it at first looks. Then he gets to the bottom line: open opposition by
noble deputies would be dangerous, not merely for those deputies, but for the nobifity mFrance as
a whole. Ferrières, Correspondance, 116-17.
59. Count de Virieu, not yet a noted reactionary, cheerfully joined in the renunciatory drama.
Asked to explain his behavior by count de Montlosier, surprised at the right’s participation in the
“frenzy,” he responded that “when the people are delirious, there are only two ways of calming
them: generosity and force. We had no force.” See François-Dominique de Reynaud de Montlosier,
Mémoires de M. le comte de MonÜosier sur la Révolution française, le Consulat, PEmpirt, la
Restauration et les principaux événemens quifontsuivie, 1755-1830 (Paris: Dufey, 1830), 1:239-40.
60. Conservatives were far more prone to put a conservative spin on August 4 than to overtly
challenge it Few of the conservatives openly proposed, as did Duval d'Eprémesnfl a year after the
event, the explicit abandonment of the principles of August 4-11 (“with the exception of personal
servitude, citizens shall have their property restored”). This proposal, coupled with a «nnh»r of
others equally contrary to the spirit of the moment, led Charles de Lameth to sranediateiy propose
sending himfor a fortnight to the madhouse <AP 19:311-12).
end o f the tithe (the official summary on August 4) shifted during the next
w eek to an uncom pensated abolition.61 T he clerics w ho now balked included
erstw hile allies o f the Third E state, including the abbé S ieyès, the guiding
sp rit o f the very idea o f a National A ssem bly. The lead -off speaker in the
clerical attem pt on August 6 to alter the article on the tithe before the final
d ecree w as Lefrançois, representing the clergy o f Caen, w ho had been an
early adherent to the Third E state's initiative in redefining itself as a National
A ssem bly.62 Even a cleric as radical as G régoire w as unhappy about the w ay
the tithe legislation w as goin g.63 T h ere w ere others w ho held that initially
tentative proposals and individual renunciations advanced in the enthusiasm
o f August 4 had been frozen into a very radical system over the next
w eek. “ T h ere is ,” observed Lally-Tolendal, “ a great difference betw een
indem nifying tithes and their suppression; betw een the specific abolition o f
such-and-such a right and the generalized abolition o f the entire feudal
regim e.”64 In the wake o f “ the abolition o f feudalism ” and the D eclaration o f
Rights o f M an and Citizen (August 26) various elem ents on the right
increasingly found one another. For som e, joining the renunciatory throng
m ay have even seem ed a form o f purging them selves o f the taint o f earlier
acts, now , suddenly, w idely defined as crim es.65 Perhaps there w ere even
61. Kessel, La mât du 4 août, 211-21; AP 8:353-54. The plan to drop indemnification from the
tithe legislation mobilized so fierce an opposition that participants were uncertain who would prevail
in a vote, the only point at which opinion was so evenly divided in that week of debate. See Jean-
François Gaultier de Biauzat, Gaultier de Biauzat, député du tiers-état aux états-généraux de 1789:
Sa vie etcorrespondance (Paris: Libraire Historique des Provinces, 1890), 245; Gauvile,Journal, 19.
62. Kessel, La nuit du 4 août, 198.
63. Henri Grégoire, Mémoires (Paris: A. Dupont, 1837), 1:78.
64. Lally-Tolendal, Mémoire. 113-14. On August 5, Malouet and other deputies from Auvergne
wrote a glowing sketch of the previous evening ("Never has a more beautiful night brought to an
end so many days of affliction”). They were hopeful of dvil peace: “We must hope that the people
shall be moved by so much generosity and return to order.” TVro days later, realizing that some
rights were to be abolished without indemnity (they claimed that, in the general excitement, they
misheard some of the discussion), they now had misgivings and were a good deal less optimistic
about a restoration of rural tranquillity. See Pierre-Victor Malouet, Correspondance de Malouetavec
¡es officers municipaux de la ville deRiom, 1788-1789 (Riom: Jouvet, ltd.), 110-11.
65. Such at any rate, is the explanation given by the marquis de Ferrières for the improbable
participation of the duke du Châtelet on the night of August 4, when he was the third noble to
speak. Unlike NoaiDes and Aiguillon, Châtelet had never been known as a liberal. As a colonel in the
French Guards, what he was currently known for, in fact, was having ordered his troops into action
in April in the famous disturbance at the Réveillon Factory in Paris's working-class neighborhood of
Saint-Antoine. His role in the renunciatory evening was to deliver a particularly “violent” diatribe
against the seigneurial regime (or so it was characterized by Duquesnoy), on which Ferrières
observes: “Duke du Châtelet, tormented by anxieties and insane terrors, seized an extremely
favorable occasion to show himself attached to the interests of the people.” Charies-Ebe de
Ferrières, Mémoires du Marquis de Ferrières (Paris: Baudoin, 1821), 1:187; Duquesnoy, Journal,
1:266; Kessel, La nuildu4 août, 146-47.
som e cm the right w ho eagerly clam ored for radical m easures in the
conviction that anything so bizarre would have to fail.66
W as there also a left that was as unhappy about the August even ts as was
the right? If there w ere any w ho regarded the d ecrees as w holly inadequate
from the ou tset, they w ere q u ie t67 Indeed, there w ere many deputies who
66. One would not expect any, nor do I know of any, participant who actually claimed to be
following what the French call the politique du pin, the tactic of supporting what one opposes so
that an unviable situation will result But at least one keen observer of the extreme right deputies
that were gathering at her mother’s salon in the faDmonths saw them acting thus: “The rest of the
aristocrats only had insults for the popular party and, not dealing with realities, believed themselves
doing good through making things worse. Completely wrapped up in justifying their reputations as
prophets, they wished their own misfortune inorder to eqjoy the satisfaction of accurate prediction"
(Aime-Louise-Germaine de Staël, Considérations sur les principaux événements de ht Révolution
française [London: Baldwin, Craddock andJoy, 1818], 1:299). Apart from it being generally plausible
that some, especially at moments of burning resentment, might vote in order to make a mess of
things, at least one important model for some nobles surely embodied such tactics. Louis XVI
seems to have explained to one of his ministers that he accepted the Constitution of 1791, thus:
“My opinion is that the literal execution of the Constitution is the best way of making the Nation
see the alterations to which it is susceptible” (cited inJohn Hardman, Louis XVI [New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1993], 208).
67. Immediately after the promulgation of the decrees, the Assembly and its Committee on
Feudal Rights received some letters complaining that anything short of total abolition would M to
stem the rural revolt, fat the country people would see the right of indemnification as valueless
(Kessel, La nuit du 4 août, 240-43). The radical journalist Marat held the decrees of August 4-11
a transparent sham: “Let’s not be anyone’s dupe. If benevolence dictated these sacrifices, one must
observe that it waited a bit late to raise its voice. It is only by the light of their burning châteaux
that they had the greatness of soul to renounce their privilege of holding in chains those who have
recovered their liberty with arms. . . . But we can’t deny ourselves some observations that help
measure the extent of the sacrifices. Does one have to prove that they are for the most part
illusory? And, first of all, the abolition of all the privileges. . . is it real, when it includes as it does,
the indemnification of the seigneurial rights, the monopolies, the feudal rights on land?” (¿'Ami du
Ptaple [September 21,1789], 98-100). One might wonder whether there were deputies who shared
Marat’s view that any abolition was a fake if it included the indemnification option, or deputies who
saw August 4-11 as merely the first step. There are occasional hints of more radical views in the
Assembly. In the course of debating anexhortation to restore rural peace on August 3 one unnamed
deputy insisted that “we mustn’t call unjust rights legitimate; they are for the most part founded on
violence.” This would seem to look ahead to the principles of the legislation of August 1792, not the
next day’s proceedings (4P 8:337). But dissent from the right was far more vocal than from the
left, in the press as in the Assembly, in the immediate aftermath of August 4; see Fabio Freddi,
“La presse parisienne et la nuit du 4 août,” Annales Historiques de la Révolution Française 57
(1985): 46-58. If we add to this picture the strength of the indemnification option in the cahiers of
the Third Estate and the stand-pat option in the cahiers oí the nobility, it seems a ptausftle
conclusion that the action of August 4-11 was already far more radical than the Assembly would
have done without rural violence. The Assembly’s attempts in the months ahead to advance a very
conservative interpretation of their own action, seems a working-out of the sentiments of the
deputies. If I might offer a mechanical analogy: the positions taken during August 4-11 are not the
unconstrained equilibrium point of a pendulum that swings under the impulse of the forces internal
to the Assembly, but a point rather to the left where that pendulum has been pushed by the
m ay have had no particular antiseigneurial animus as such but w ho could

em brace such actions as expedients to pacify the peasants— and w ho m ight
easily shift to a m ore conservative position later on when the countryside
show ed itself unwilling to calm dow n. W hen such benefits as they w ere
prepared to give, augm ented by m oral exhortation, failed to pacify the
countryside, even deputies w ith considerable concern about the issue o f
seigneurialism could counsel force. In his speech o f June 15, 1791, M erlin,
clearly frustrated by continuing rural turbulence, explained the law on the
burden o f p roof when lord and peasants differ over the validity o f a particular
seigneurial claim . H e had the w eary air o f one w ho could not imagine how it
could be put m ore clearly. H e presum ed that, this tim e, properly instructed
peasants would willingly pay. In the rare cases in which a peasant would not
com ply, how ever, he should be held to be “ rebel against the law, usurper o f
another’s property, bad citizen, the enem y o f a ll” M ilitary force m ay be
utilized; the A ssem bly th erefore “ has reason to exp ect that the citizens o f
the countryside, able to appreciate all the good done for them by the
A ssem bly, shall everyw here speedily acquit the obligations from which they
are unable to free them selves” (AP 27:242).
One concern raised by a turn tow ard coercive m easures w as exp ressed
by Adrien D uquesnoy. H e feared that proposals for force m ight be deceptive
pretexts to strengthen royal authority and could be used ultim ately to
reestablish royal tyranny over the A ssem bly. On the other hand, he
con ceded, the troubles w ere quite real: “ But, in the end they exist and they
m ust b e rep ressed .”*686 9 D uquesnoy, th erefore, w ants to be careful that
arm ed force used against urban plebeians be under the control o f civil
authority to avoid a m ilitary-sponsored dictatorship. In the countryside,
how ever, he would give the arm y a free hand.60
Even a single deputy m ight have several distinct reactions to August 4,
as show n in the correspondence o f Pinteville de C em on, noble deputy o f
Châlons. A w eek earlier Pinteville had expressed pleased satisfaction at the
thought o f “ sacrifice by those w ho by their birth are devoted” to p rotect the
nation.70 This is the im age o f a w arrior nobility now sacrificing itself on the
field o f fiscal com bat If one w ere seeking an appropriate occasion for delight
in the m oral w orth o f the nobility defined in such term s, August 4 w ould
seem m ade to order. Pinteville w rote on the fifth that “ last evening and
n igh t the French show ed great patriotic character w hose energy and
disruptive mobilization of the country people; the “natural” equilibrium, without that collective
action, is a rightward shift
68. Duquesnoy, Journal, 2:417,425.
69. Ibid., 2:418.
70. R. Popelin, “Extrait de la correspondance de Pinteville, baron de Cemon," Mémoires de la
Société <tAgriculture, Commerce, Sciences etArts de la Marne, ser. 1,26 (1880-81): 13.
heroism shall astonish Europe— or rather the universe; it is not a m atter o f

sieges nor o f battles but o f the m ost com plete victory over prejudices and
personal in terests” (1 6 ). But ten days later he reflects on indem nification:
‘‘T he country people haven't enough m oney to pay o ff the principal o f the
chamfyart and the oth er rights. Take back from them a part o f their land:
they will gladly sacrifice it to free the r e s t ___ [T he lord] will acquire in this
w ay som e m agnificent possession s and a domain w hose ow nership w ill be
m ore advantageous to him than [various rights]” (18). In a nine-day span,
Pinteville goes from an exalted sen se o f noble sacrifice to a c o d evaluation
of seigneurial gain (and peasant sacrifice).
Legislators Talk About Rural Revolt

Late July 1789 m ay have been the greatest w ave o f rural revolt in the entire
revolutionary period, but it w as far from the only one, as w e have seen in
Chapter 6. If the great July peak produced the great drama o f the belea
guered legislature going faster and further than they w ere at first prepared
to go (although going in a direction many wanted to g o m ore slow ly o r less
far), the lesser peaks pushed them further still if in a less frenzied fashion
that never repeated the drama o f the night o f the fourth. Initial responses
to subsequent w aves o f disturbance recalled many o f the legislative reactions
to the insurrections o f the R evolution's first sum m er the vain proposals for
repression, the pragm atic claim s for a conciliatory policy aim ed at securing
rural assent, the attem pts to use the rural disturbances to press particular
aims against political opponents.71 Count d’A goult thought that the left
wanted to prevent any effective pacification “because if the troubles cease,
they will lose their influence.”72
C onsider the intertwining o f these them es in Alexandre Lam eth’s reflec
tion on the legislative repercussions o f rural turbulence. H e w as addressing
a report to the National A ssem bly on February 18, 1790, in w hich the
Com m ittee (Hi the Constitution proposed m echanism s for invoking martial
law. France w as in the peak m onth o f the secon d great w ave o f rural
insurrection (se e Table 6 .3 ). Lam eth was skeptical about the effectiven ess
o f martial law in the countryside. It m ight w ell w ork in the tow ns w here
there is “ a solidarity that derives from the fact that all individuals have
71. The invocation of rural turbulence to cover particular agendas seems to have begun rather
earlier than August 4. OnJuly 25, 1789, a deputy from Franche-Comté urged the Assembly to see
its disorders as stemming from popular desire to abolish that province’s parlement See Jacques
Antoine Creuzé-Latouche, Journal des ttats-gtniraux et du dtímt de ÍAssembUe Nationale, 18
rnai-29 juillet 1789 (Paris: Henri Didier, 1946), 278.
72. Egret, La Rholution des notables, 106.
greater o r lesser interests in protecting their property and the fruits o f their
industry; but the countryside is inhabited alm ost exclusively by proletarians
w ho are naturally led to abuse laws against property held for the m ost part
by nobles or by those w ho aspire [to becom e n ob le].”73
Lam eth considers at som e length various proposals to com bine support
fo r protecting property and tax collection on the one hand with avoiding
concentrations o f force in the hands o f potential foes o f the Revolution; this
leads into a discussion o f the legislative fine-tuning o f the d ecrees o f August
4 (3 4 6 -6 8 ). Tow ard the end o f that sam e w ave o f uprisings o f w inter 1790,
A drien D uquesnoy points out that “ It seem s obvious to many that the feudal
rights are the great occasion for these m ovem ents; it is therefore high tim e
that w e w orked on this m atter and very soon sort these into indem nifiable
and non-indem nifiable righ ts.” H e points w ith envy to a peaceful England’s
capacity to double the rate o f taxation that is feasible in F rance.74 IW o
years later as w ar approached and another great insurrectionary w ave was
building, Couthon urged the Legislative A ssem bly to see that the French
arm y w ould never be effective unless the villagers receive m ore than fine
w ords from the Revolution. “ D o you w ish, M essieurs, to assure the prom pt
recovery o f taxes?” his peroration begins, as he adm onishes his fellow
legislators to ease the term s o f indem nification o r else see the future o f
the Revolution threatened by “ the m ortal indifference o f opinion” in the
cou n tryside.”757 6
T h e rural disturbances w ere also rhetorically available to th ose w ho
sought to generate support for other, often radical, m easures. Lam eth’s
account o f legislative discussions provoked by the rising o f early February
1790, for exam ple, show s Périrai using the occasion to attack prim ogeniture.
Prim ogeniture is brought into the discussion as a rebellion-triggering facet
o f the feudal regim e “ established to give the eld est son the m eans to m eet
his responsibility to lead m en o f arm s to w ar.” Lam eth plainly sees anti
prim ogeniture as a vehicle to radically and sim ultaneously reorganize fam ily
relations, social conflict, the French econom y, and even state finances. By
ending the “ shocking differences” in property division, “ hatreds am ong the
children” will be avoided, which will lead to a reforging o f fam ily ties;
by equalizing properties, the num ber o f both “ proletarians and colossal
properties” will diminish, reducing rural con flict The disrespect o f the laws,
characteristic o f the ultrarich and ultrapoor, will diminish; and the increased
p rogress o f agriculture and industry should perm it an increase in state
reven u es.78 In the cou rse o f another discussion o f the sam e w ave o f
73. Lameth, Histoire, 346.

74. Duquesnoy, Journal, 2:417-18. See also Ms comments on Mardi 6 (2:441).
75. Georges Couthon, Discours sur le rachat des droits seigneuriaux, prononcé à la séance du
mercredi29février 1792 (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1792). The quoted passage is on 8.
76. Lameth, Histoire, 366.
disturbances, (m e deputy pointed to the insurrections as the reason for

com pleting the new constitution (4 P 11:49).
T he troubles o f N ovem ber 1792 provided another occasion that could be
pointed to on behalf o f a radical vision. Although our data show the
disturbances that m onth to be overw helm ingly over subsistence (se e Table
6 .3 ), w hen R obespierre rises to speak on N ovem ber 30 they becom e an
argum ent for accelerating the lagging trial o f the king (in order to reestablish
resp ect for the Convention’s authority).77 C onservatives, like radicals, could
point to rural troubles in making a case for their ow n concern s. In the cou rse
o f the insurrectionary w ave o f the w inter o f 1789-90, Adrien D uquesnoy
noted with am usem ent and irritation those w ho exaggerated the threat o f
peasant m ovem ents to try to scare deputies into placing m ore m ilitary force
under the king’s com m and.78
A s a final instance o f putting peasant insurrection into the rhetorical
service o f a political agenda, consider Bertrand B arère’s m agnificent per
form ance in the Convention on M arch 18, 1793, Counterrevolution w as at
its height (se e Figs. 6 .3 [a M d ]). Barère paints a tableau in which “passions,
intrigues and divisions” am ong the revolutionary leadership, foreign ene
m ies, ém igré nobles, priests, and peasant “ fanatics” in the W est reinforce
one another and encourage p oorer peasants to attem pt to seize the proper
ties o f the w ealthy. The rural slide into “ anarchy" can only be halted by
stem , repressive m easures to reassure the rich and generous m easures
(a ccess to ém igré land, division o f the com m ons, p oor relief, progressive
taxation) to earn the support o f the poor; to coordinate all this, w hile dealing
sim ultaneously with divisiveness at the top, B arère urges, as if it w ere an
afterthought, the creation o f “ a com m ittee o f public safety” (4 P 6 0 :2 9 0 -9 4 ).
Thus rural insurrection becom es the justification for beginning to set up the
central institution o f the T error.
What Do You Do After You Have Totally

Abolished Feudalism?
Even w ithout continuing rural disturbances, the d ecrees o f August 4 -1 1
would have com pelled subsequent legislative action, in ord er to specify the
fate o f the m yriad o f particular rights. But rural disturbances did continue
77. Maximilien Robespierre, Oeuvres (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1950), 9:106-9.
78. Duquesnoy, Journal, 2:413-14, 418-19, 422-23. The lodging of such force in royal hands
was a major goal of conservatives (for example, Maury, Casalfes, Duval d'Eprémesnil) in the
debates of February 1790 and a major fear of the developing Jacobin grouping (for »«n y i»
Robespierre, Fétion).
and legislators repeatedly had to ch oose a repertoire erf actions: repressive

actions to halt disruption and avoid con cession s; conciliatory actions to
satisfy peasants and halt disruption w hile avoiding repression; and what I
suggest w e call instructive actions: attem pts to convince the peasantry that
their interests w ere already m et In early February, for exam ple, consider
ing rep orts o f violen ce in the southw estern countryside, one legislator from
rebellious Périgord urged firm ness (“ I surely m ust be m ade to pay b efore
I'll p ay") while deputies from m ore peaceful Champagne and A lsace insisted
m i drawing clear legal distinctions betw een the abolished and the indem nified
so as to “ enlighten the people” (A P 1 1 :4 1 8 -1 9 ). D ebate raged throughout
February on tw o issu es: (1 ) the m ix o f pedagogic and repressive approaches
to the insurrectionary countryside in Brittany and the Southw est; and (2 )
the division o f control over the arm ed forces betw een the new local
governm ents and the king. It w as a debate that allow ed many participants
to claim to believe that the people w ere good but ignorant and led astray;
fo r Jacobins to exp ress fears o f royal “ dictatorship"; for a part o f the right
to exp ress adm iration for the toughness with which English governm ents
could deal with popular disturbances; and fo r many to debate the com plicity
o f local officials and rural rioters.79
I shall trace the history o f the legislation here with an ey e on how the
legislators cop ed with rebelling peasants.80 W e shall look again at the
August 4 -1 1 d ecrees seen now as the first in a series o f respon ses to an
insurrectionary countryside. In order to gain som e perspective on the
cou rse o f the legislative history o f the dism antling o f the seigneurial regim e,
later in this chapter I shall also briefly sketch som e o f the sim ilar or
contrasting features o f legislation on tw o other prim e peasant con cern s: the
tithe and a ccess to land. This set o f com parisons will help bring out som e o f
the distinctive elem ents o f the role o f seigneurial rights in the Revolution.
T h e m ajor m om ents o f legislative action on these issues are sum m arized in
Table 8 .1 . It indicates the dates o f adoption o f the m ore im portant p ieces o f
legislation on seigneurial rights, the tithe, and rights over land as w ell as
som e o f the m ajor statem ents o f position on these m atters.81 (W hen the
seigneurial rights and tithes w ere covered in the sam e speech or enactm ent
I join ed them under the heading “ Feudalism .”)
In brief sum mary, the m ajor turning points in the seigneurial rights
79. AP 11:222-24, 365-73, 418-19, 456, 536-38, 613-15, 641, 652-58, 665-85.
80. In Chapter 9 1shad examine the legislation as a conceptual structure.
81. I omitted legislation affecting wage issues as being too small a component of rural actions; I
abo omitted legislation as weO as anxious speeches and reports on subsistence issues since these
were complex compounds of urban and rural mobilizations and generally more urban than rural.
(Nevertheless the urban popular upheavals had a significant interaction with the largely rural ones in
port because rural people took part in urban market events and, in part, because efforts to supply
population concentrations caused subsistence problems in smaller places.)
Table 8.1. Principal Legislative Actions on Rural Issues, Summer 1789-S
June 18-July 6,1792 Seigneurial rights All irregular dues are abolished. Burden of proof in contested cases is placed
on lord.
>: Major turning points in legislation on seigneurial rights are italicized; debates without immediate legislative actions arc in parentheses.
legislation beyond the initial August d ecree w ere three: the enactm ent a
half-year later in M arch 1790 o f the proposal o f a subcom m ittee o f the
Com m ittee on Feudal R ights; the d ecree o f late August 1792, w hich w as
profoundly m ore favorable to those w ho ow ed paym ents; and the d ecree o f
July 1793, w hich constituted the definitive end o f the system , at least insofar
as anything w as defin itive.821 shall briefly outline here the content o f these
th ree acts.
T h e initial p roject announced on August 11, 1789, sim ultaneously p ro
claim ed the com plete abolition o f the feudal regim e as w ell as a series o f
sketchy but im portant prom ises that w ere not con sisten t with such a
sw eeping claim . N ot consistent by any com m onsense standards, that is: as
w e shall see, by som e very special definitions o f what one m ight m ean by
“ feudal regim e” and “ abolish” one could m anage to be roughly con sisten t
B roadly speaking, seigneurial rights w ere to be divided into tw o classes: (1 )
th ose based on personal servitude o r that in som e w ay sym bolized that
abject status, which w ere to be sim ply elim inated; and (2 ) th ose rights that
w ere to be regarded as burdens but that w ere not to be sim ply rem oved
from their ow ners until som e m eans o f indem nifying th ose ow ners w as to
b e w orked o u t T h e task confronting M erlin's subcom m ittee w as to distin
guish which rights w ere in w hich group. A secon d subcom m ittee, under
Iton ch et, w as then to report on the m odalities o f indem nification for th ose
rights to be provisionally m aintained.
This outcom e o f early August 1789 already con ceded m ore to the
countryside than all w ere com fortable w ith. Q uite apart from lords w ith
substantial seigneurial revenues w ho w anted to hold to an intransigent and
integralist position (a view point that inform ed a significant m inority o f noble
cahiers), it is a highly plausible speculation that som e o f th ose involved in
the eternally celebrated night w ere quite deliberately attem pting to put the
best face on things and save what could be saved under the com bined
82. The daim to have abolished the feudal regime in its entirety provided peasants with a
justification for further insurrection and officials with a justification for holding fast in the years that
followed the decrees of August 4-11, 1789. The boundary between legitimate property and
illegitimate usurpation was continually shifted in response to political struggle. The line as drawn in
July 1793 was definitive, not because of its superior jurisprudential logic, but because subsequent
peasant action was containable. One of the fears invoked by the right about August 4-11, 1789,
was that once the notion of illegitimate usurpation was raised, who could control how far it would
carry? The law of July 17, 1793, attempted to distinguish feudal payments from nonfeudal rent In
providing for the destruction of the legal documents embodying what all now agreed were payments
of the first kind, they also were ordering destruction of titles to what most held to be of the second.
Some regions then witnessed sporadic peasant attempts to avoid rents. If the lords had once
attempted to see seigneurial rights as property and therefore legitimate, some peasants had now
learned to see property as itself usurped and as no different than seigneurial claims. As the right
had held, to invoke the notion of usurpation to distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate, was
to raise the specter of claims that all property was theft
threats o f peasant insurrection, the m ore radical faction in the National

A ssem bly that w anted to junk the rights anyway, and a pragm atic group o f
deputies con cern ed about state finances w ho accepted the abolition o f
seigneurial rights as the price to be paid for peasant loyalty, rural tranquility,
and a return to tax collection . We see all th ese con cern s surfacing in and
around the even ts o f August 4 -1 1 : Salom on’s alarm ing rep ort on rural
violen ce on August 3 that introduced a proposed hortatory d ecree insistent
on tax paym ents;83 the attem pt on the m orning o f August 4 to continue the
A ssem bly’s internally divisive p roject o f preparing a D eclaration o f Rights
(A P 8 :3 3 9 -4 1 ); C ontroller-G eneral N eckeris elaborate presentation on
August 7, right in the m iddle o f the discussions o f the feudal regim e,
rem inding everyon e o f the centrality o f the financial situation (AP 8:361).
And w e see division am ong the m overs and the follow ers o f the great drama
o f August 4, over ju st how far to g o and over what to con ced e. The
triggering m echanism w as a plan, elaborated in som e detail by the B reton
Club— the caucus o f the m ore intransigent^ radical deputies— for a dram atic
call for change in which prestigious figures would lend their nam es to a
m ajor statem ent on seigneurial rights that w ould, w ith luck, secu re peasant
com pliance, undercut the potential for m ore radical m easures, and yet
w ould p reserve significant aspects o f the seigneurial regim e by insisting on
continuing paym ents pending indem nification. Recall, as A lfred Cobban did,
that many deputies w ere them selves holders o f seigneurial rights and would
have been injured by sim ple, outright, im m ediate, and total abolition.848 5
Recall as w ell, as Cobban did m ot, that the only solution to the financial crisis
that anyone w as advocating w as som e form o f land sale, w ith royal and
ecclesiastical properties the only on es anyone had the stom ach to g o a fte r86
83. In the subsequent debate, other deputies variously proposed that any legislative action be
postponed pending an investigation of the facts; that “feudal matters” were so difficult and so
important (hat nothing be decreed until a constitution was written; that seigneurial rights be
abolished at once, without which such a hortatory declaration would further anger the countryside;
that stem punishment be ordered for tax refusal. It was decided to send the matter back to
committee (AP 8:336-37).
University Press, 1965), 44-48.
85. The claim that royal lands could be thought of as the property of the nation rather than of
Louis was fairly easy although not altogether beyond debate (see AP 15:451). Rather more difficult
was taking the church’s own defense of tax exemption literally; the church did not own the land it
used but merely held usufruct rights. The nation, in this reasoning, owned the land, but permitted
the church to use its revenues to support its vital work. Thus the revolutionary state’s apologists
could claim to be within the parameters of tradition in reprding the church as under state
supervision and in finding a different use for the land. Indeed, there was some precedent for dis
very step. Reacting to financial crises and pushed by the Third Estate at the Estates-General of
1560, the government sold off a part of church landholdings between 1563 and 1591. See Emmanuel
Le Roy Ladurie, Les paysans deLanguedoc (Palis: Service d’Edition et de Vente des Publications de
l’Education Nationale. 1966), 359-71.
yet the lands o f church and king ow ed a significant part o f their value to their
associated seigneurial rights. An im m ediate, total, and uncom pensated
abolition w ould seriou sly com prom ise the only plan in tow n for dealing with
the state finances. Recall, in the third place, that the relatively “ im personal”
(“ p atriotic,” if you w ill) issue o f state finances w as indirectly very personal
to m any deputies w ho, like m any o f the w ell-off o f the Old Regim e, held
significant investm ents in governm ent annuities o f on e sort o r another and
for whom state bankruptcy m ight be a short step from destruction o f the
fam ily fortune. The duke d’Aiguillon w as a natural as the lead -off speaker:
he w as a man o f alm ost unim aginable w ealth, a good deal o f it in the form o f
seigneurial rights. A plan he endorsed m ight carry great w eight w ith oth er
righ ts-h olders.86 On the assum ption that the duke’s actual perform ance
follow ed the plan, it is striking to n ote that he only spoke o f indem nification
o f som e rights. M any rights w ere unm entioned even by im plication and the
notion o f uncom pensated abolition for any rights w as not m entioned at alL
Indeed, if one w ere to read AiguSlon’s speech out o f con text it w ould b e
a defen se o f property righ ts.87 Popular ferm ent, the duke began, supported
liberty against royal m inisters but now “ is an obstacle to that sam e lib erty.”
But on e m ust recogn ize, he w ent on, that it isn’t ju st crim inals but “ the
w hole people” w ho have form ed “ a sort o f league to d estroy the châteaux?’
and w ho w ildly exaggerate the culpability o f the lords. (It is the seigneurial
agents w ho are genuinely blam ew orthy.) T o show the country p eople one
m eans w ell, the duke proposed ending tax privileges (including local and
regional privileges) and perm itting indem nification. Out o f con text, this
w ould have been seen as a speech offering the countryside tax equality in
return for a w illingness to settle for the right to buy out the seigneurial
obligations (AP 8 :3 4 4 ). (I stress the right to buy, since the proposed rate
w as plainly out o f the reach o f m any.)88
T he even t got o ff to quite a different start, how ever, w hen viscount de
86. Barère claimed that he was rebuffed when he approached the group around Aiguillon and
Lameth on August 3 and 4 to ask for a part in the action being planned: "They told me that it must
be nobles who propose the destruction of feudal rights and judges in portement who propose
abolishing venality of office” (Barère, Mémoires, 269-70).
87. If one assumes that Aiguillon was unaffected by NoaiUes’s intervention and delivered his
original speech as planned, it follows that the lead-off address hatched the night before in the Breton
Chib was far more of a defense of property rights than it was an attack on anything whatsoever.
88. One might argue that under the conditions that prevailed between May 1790 (when these
rates were adopted) and the spring of 1792 (when the laws began to be radically altered) the claim
that peasants couldn’t pay was not so much an objective reality as a successful social construction
by the peasants themselves. Aiguillon proposed reimbursing seigneurial rights at thirty times their
annual value (AP 8:344). The rates actually adopted were lower—twenty or twenty-five times the
annual value depending on the right, for fixed and periodic payouts, and more complex quantities for
occasional payments (AP 15:365-68). But peasants claimed they couldn’t payand generally speaking
did not pay; see Chapter 3, note 73.
Noaüles violated the script by taking the flotar and introducing the critical
distinction betw een illegitim ate rights to be ended outright and th ose to be
subject to indem nification. N othing could get this distinction o ff the agenda,
on ce on; n or could the later vast outpouring o f personal proposals to
renounce various claim s be put back in the bottle; nor could the condem na
tions o f seigneurialism that follow ed be blotted over by Aiguillon’s portrait
o f innocent lords unfairly blam ed for the m isdeeds o f their agents. A s if
responding to Aiguillon, L e Guen de Kérangal o f Brittany pointed ou t that it
was by virtue o f the high charges paid to the lord by his agents that those
agents w ere in turn forced to charge the peasants ruinous rates. B y contrast
to Aiguillon’s anodine portrait o f lord-peasant relations, L e Guen de Kérangal
stressed the humiliating character o f som e o f the rights known in his
province, in particular the obligation “ to spend nights beating the ponds to
prevent the frog s from troubling the sleep o f voluptuous lord s.”89 W e have
seen that on e o f the m ost im portant w ays o f attem pting to defend seigneurial
rights w as to invoke h on or the nobility p rofessed its attachm ents to its
honorific rights, not its lucrative (m es, although it m ight stretch its sen se o f
honor to em brace the profitable (se e Chapter 2, p. 47, and Chapter 4 , p.
190 e t se q .) T h e counterpart o f noble honor, peasant hum iliation, w as, to
be sure, studiously avoided in noble cahiers (se e Chapter 2, p. 4 9 ). L e
Guen de KérangaTs evocation o f the ritualized hum iliations o f the B reton
countryside w as a preem ptive rhetorical strike that flavored the evening
with feudal barbarism rather than honorable serv ice.90
T he evening’s re su lt a distinction betw een tw o kinds o f rights (but w hich
w ere w hich?), many to be indem nified (by whom ? at what ra tes?); a daim
to abolish feudalism entirely (but what w as “ feudalism ” and what was
“ abolish” ?); and a variety o f oth er claim s to be given up, ranging from
regional privileges to periodic paym ents to the papacy. W hile unquestionably
going further than the m ore intransigent defenders o f seigneurial rights
w anted, then, and probably going further than the planners o f the night o f
August 4 had aim ed at, the results w ere still very unclear. H ow the in terests
o f payers and holders o f rights w ere effected w ould not be clarified until the
definitive division o f rights betw een the tw o categories and the setting o f
rates o f indem nification. T h ese decisions, how ever, w ould await the detailed
legislation to be prepared by the Com m ittee on Feudal Rights— w hich would
89. AP 8:344. On such humiliations, see Chapter 2, p. 49.

90. Le Guen de Kérangal was followed by a lawyer from Besançon who went beyond the real
serfdom of Franche-Comté to depict a world of horrific fantasy in which lords could warm their feet
on wintertime hunts in the entrails of their peasants. This speech as wel as Le Guen de Kérangal's
provided the few points at which the nobles present seemed to feel free to express their indignation
at being slandered See Ferrières, Mémoires, 1:187.
then be debated. C onceivably the peasants had w on a great victory— and

ju st as conceivably, holders o f rights had lost little.91
K essel has show n very d early that deputies w ere giving their constituents
quite different advice as to what had been voted .92 Indeed, this very
unclarity m ay have been on e o f the attractions o f the package. T h e very
notion o f indem nification had to raise so many questions as to guarantee
delay in deciding on any cou rse o f action and to ensure confusion in w hatever
schem e w as adopted. W hich rights w ere to be indem nified? H ow w as their
value to be reckoned, at what rate w ere they to be paid off, w ho w as to
carry out property assessm ents, and w ho w as to pay for the assessm ents?
W ho, for that m atter, w as to pay for the indem nification— the state o r th ose
su bject to the seigneurial rights? If several peasants ow ed a tord collectively,
could they pay separately; or if one peasant ow ed several lords could they
be paid separately; or if on e peasant ow ed one lord m ultiple dues w ere the
dues to be separable? W as indem nification m erely to be perm itted or w as it
to be m andated, conceivably against the w ishes o f a particular peasant? And
what o f a peasant and lord w ho m ight com e to a free agreem ent on a
different rate o f paym ent than the A ssem bly m ight propose? Small w onder
that the Com m ittee cm Feudal Rights, in the m iddle o f the R evolution, took
seven m onths to actually issue a r e p o rt93 B y raising a h ost o f tough issu es,
the central question o f w ho w on and w ho lost what was left hanging. Som e
con servatives could vote for such a plan w ith the rationale that it could be
rendered m eaningless on ce rural insurrection died dow n. Som e radicals
could vote for such a plan as the opening w edge o f a real abolition. For som e
deputies the tem porary sen se o f unity m ay have afforded an achievem ent
not to be throw n away by speedily clarifying precisely w ho w ould benefit
and w ho w ould lose. For som e, the very special clim ate o f n oble-T h ird
E state am ity that prevailed at the end o f July— w hen the king asked the
nobles to join the National A ssem bly— already yielded a pleasureable sen se
91. One of the arguments the marquis de Ferrières used to try to seDhis noble constituents back
home on the idea of grinning and bearing it was to contend that carefully read, the legislation was
going to cost the nobles a lot less than they might at first think. See Ferrières, Correspondance, 116.
92. Kessel, La nuit du 4 août, 175-79; 229-43. It would be a miracle if the deputies did have a
dear consensus. They had discussed a vast number of issues over a week’s time in a huge
uncomfortable hall with poor acoustics in the August heat Their normal working day, as Edna
Hindie Lemay has discovered, was very long and an abnormal day like August 4 was even longer.
The sketchy summary voted at the end of the evening of August 4 doesn’t capture all that was said.
The draft under debate from August 5 on was different; and journalistic accounts the delegates
might use to prod their no doubt fatigued memories disagreed with each other. See Edna Hindie
Lemay, La vie quotidienne des députés aux états généraux de 1789 (Paris: Hachette, 1987), 204-6.
93. Most of these problems are addressed in a cranky presentation by a committee member,
lYonchet, to the Assembly, delivered in a tone of resentment at having been saddled with such an
array of impossible questions. See AP 12:387-401.
o f fraternité and on e w ell w orth keeping. Tim othy Tackett persuasively

points out that the im m ediate result o f noble participation for many deputies
w as an exciting sen se o f overcom ing d ifferen ces.9*
In M arch 1790 the practical m eaning, for the National A ssem bly, o f the
“ abolition” o f “ feudalism ” w as m uch clarified: it w as clearly a com prom ise—
and on e with an extrem ely conservative slan t A t issue w as how M erlin’s
plan w ould distinguish th ose rights to be abolished outright from th ose to be
collected until an indem nity (on term s to be decided later) w as paid.9 95 On
4
the other hand, many oth er rights w ere clearly abolished ou trigh t T he
justification w orked out by M erlin for distinguishing the tw o classes o f rights
turned out to be not m erely incidental, but integrally w oven into the fabric
o f this com plex law. Rights seized by force w ere regarded as illegitim ate
and hence abolished outright; rights that derived from a freely consented
contract w ere regarded as legitim ate property and th erefore as nuisances
that could be abolished by a forw ard-looking state, but only upon paym ent
o f adequate com pensation. A significant group o f rights w as abolished
outright including th ose that carried the deep est taint o f personal humiliation.
T he very notion o f honorific rights was now anathema. T he oth ers, m ost
im portant, the various paym ents in cash and kind, w ere still in force.
M erlin’s m apping o f em pirically existing rights into th ese broad categories
rested on the contention that rights o f particular kinds could be presum p
tively assum ed to be based on coercion or consent; but the law recognized
in practice a third category as w ell For rights in this very substantial grey
area, there w ould be a tentative presum ption o f legitim acy, but peasant
com m unities could m ount a cou rt challenge w ere they able to develop
eviden ce to the effect that the supposedly consensual arrangem ent w as in
fact a violent usurpation. Since few peasant com m unities could in practice
dem onstrate that any specific m onopoly on m illing, say, derived from
coercion rather than contract, this w as hardly an appealing p rosp ect in
village France. L et us recall the propensity tow ard fosterin g law suits that so
appealed to the reform -m inded in the Third E state assem blies o f the
previous M arch and the indifference to judicial recou rse am ong reform -
m inded peasant com m unities (se e Chapter 3, pp. 1 2 3 -2 4 , 129). T his issue
o f the burden o f p roof in disputed instances w as a m atter o f considerable
94. Tbckett, “Nobles andThird Estate,” 282, points to the significance of this newfound fraternity
in preparing the ground for August 4.
95. The seigneurial courts were slated for an unindemnified suppression by the law of August
11, 1789, but were maintained provisionally pendingjudicial reorganization. They therefore became
assimilated into the National Assembly’s work on the French judiciary in general and the timetable
for the important subsequent legislative enactments was distinct from the rest of the seigneurial
rights: October 8-9, 1789; November 3, 1789; and August 16-24, 1790, are the mqjor dates. I
shall not pursue this important institution further here.
im portance in the unfolding dialogue o f country people and legislators, as w e

shall see below .
It is probably fair to see M erlin's rep ort as about as conservative as
possible w ithout altogether violating the param eters o f the August 4 -1 1
d ecree. In som e w ays, indeed, it did violate them . T he plain language o f the
A ugust enactm ent called for the abolition o f serfdom and anything w ith a
taint o f servile status. M erlin's report invented a new distinction, not
introduced at any point in the debates from August 4 to August 11. T h ere
w ere first, M erlin urged, seigneurial obligations that only fell on serfs;
secon d, there w ere claim s that fell on serfs as a m atter o f em pirical fact but
that w ere not inherently servile, and that could be paid by free p eople (4 P
1 1 :5 0 1 -5 ). T h ese latter, M erlin proposed, w ere not abolished along with
serfdom . In short, serfdom w as abolished but with the form er serfs now
paying as m uch as possible o f what they had always paid.
G iven the geographic narrow ness o f serfdom , far m ore im portant to m ost
country people than the m aintenance o f many burdens o f form er serfs now
defined as free, w as the assignm ent o f the burden o f p roof in con tested
ca ses to the peasants. C onsider the legislation as o f M arch 1790, in light o f
the noble cahiers. T h ose noble cahiers that defended the rights o f the lords
had used the language o f “ h on or,” stressed their honorific rights, and
stretch ed the boundaries o f this category; or, m ore com m only, they used
the language o f “ p rop erty ,'' alm ost equally elastic (se e Chapter 2, pp. 34,
47 and Chapter 3, p. 85). In August and the follow ing M arch claim s o f
distinctions o f honor w ere now utterly repudiated; the claim o f property,
how ever, had a good deal o f life left in it If many noble lords w ere likely to
b e unhappy, w as peasant satisfaction a reasonable expectation?
If legislators w ho had hoped that the m agic o f August 4 w ould k eep the
countryside tranquil forever— and certainly (see Fig. 8 .1 ) it did appear to
have had an im m ediate effect— D ecem ber-F ebruary m ust have been a great
disappointm ent and a great puzzle as w ell, since th ese w ere areas (B rittany,
Q uercy, R ouergue, Lim ousin) that hadn’t been in the forefron t in the spring
and sum m er o f 1789.96 M erlin’s draft law w as announced in the wake o f that
new , m ajor rising. W hy m ight the legislators now hope for any better
resu lts? M erlin de D ouai’s carefully crafted report urged the tripartite
division into contractual, usurped, and presum ptively usurped but su bject to
(im probable) challenge, described above. I shall com m ent on the intellectual
96. The extreme uncertainty as to what these new insurrections were all about and what to do
about them permeates the extensive legislative discussion of February 9, 1790. The deputies were
ultimately puzzled enough about the intractibility of southwestern violence, in fact, to send out an
investigative team who produced one of the most interesting documents of the era. See Jacques
Godard et Léonard Robin, Rapport de MessieursJ. Godard et L. Robin, commissaires civils, envoyés
par le roi, dans le département du Lot, en exécution du décret de FAssemblée Nationale, du 13
décembre, 1790 (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1791), 24.
rationale by which he justified th ese distinctions in Chapter 9 ; at this point I

stress the political convenience. If one g oes bade to the cahiers o f the
previous M arch, only on e year ago (but what a yea r!), on e finds that
the peasants them selves, although w ith very different rationales than those
deployed in the National A ssem bly, had roughly the sam e distinctions (see
Chapter 3, p. 91; AP 1 1 :5 3 6 -3 8 ). In short, I suggest that what m ade this
p roject viable w as less the intellectual persuasion o f M erlin’s classification,
than it w as the hope that it would give the peasants enough o f what they
w anted that they wouldn’t fight for m ore. But the peasants o f M arch 1790
w ere not the peasants o f M arch 1789 and there w as m ore (and m ore severe)
antiseigneurial contestation ahead.
In any even t, the full m eaning o f M erlin’s report m ight appear very
differently in light o f the rates o f indem nification and the m odalities o f
paym ent that rem ained to be s e t Could an individual peasant w ho ow ed
many rights to a lord indem nify them one at a tim e or did it have to be done
as a bloc? Could a group o f peasants w ho collectively ow ned rights to a lord
buy back their rights individually? W hat w ould unpaid arrears— quite com
m on in the confusion o f 1789— do to all these arrangem ents? It is sym ptom
atic o f the drive to find com prom ise, already a vital elem ent o f August 4,
that the National A ssem bly actually passed this d ecree w ithout first dealing
with the report o f TVonchet's subcom m ittee on indem nification rates; this
latter law w as not debated and enacted until M ay. A s in August, the National
A ssem bly m anaged a dram atic action on a central issue o f the Revolution
while postponing an absolutely essential decision w ithout which it was
im possible to say ju st what that action w ould m ean to anyone. W hen finally
delivered in M ay, the proposed indem nification option could hardly be called
pro-peasant. In brief sum mary, the M ay law set term s im possibly difficult in
a variety o f w ays for many peasant com m unities. Apart from high rates,
peasants ow ing a bundle o f obligations could not indem nify them separately
nor could a group o f peasants collectively responsible to a lord be assigned
individual allotm ents. If one w anted to read “ the” m eaning o f August 4
through the detailed legislation o f the follow ing M arch and M ay, it w ould
certainly seem to be a plan to give away as little as possible beyond grand
statem ents. (T o anticipate the discussion below , the secon d w ave o f rural
risings from D ecem ber 1789 through February 1790 had not been accom pa
nied by a great Parisian upheaval that altered the political com plexion o f
the A ssem bly).
A variety o f oth er m easures follow ed. In mid-June 1790, follow ing closely
upon the antiseigneurial, religious, and subsistence disturbances o f that
m onth that peaked June 1 and June 9 (refer to Table 6 .3 ), the National
A ssem bly rather dram atically declared an end to all hereditary distinctions
(AP 16:378). This was a follow -up, rather than a reversal, o f the positions
o f August and M arch, w hich declared illegitim ate rights based on differential
honor, w hile maintaining th ose based on som e claim o f property. T he

m arquis de F errières w avered in his reactions. On June 20, he w rote to an
alternate deputy from Saumur that the term ination o f the various privileges
o f the nobility in tax exem ptions and in a ccess to p osts, the new inheritance
law s, the abolition o f seigneurial cou rts, and the like had already effectively
destroyed the nobility in any m aterial sen se; the new law aim ed at destroyin g
nobility as an idea “ that resu lts from a long habit o f r e s p e c t” But this goal
will fail “ because it is im possible that each man is not the son o f his father;
because nobility shall be transm itted, as before, by tradition and the link o f
identity shall alw ays exist betw een today’s noble and his m ost rem ote
posterity. ”97 On the oth er hand, he w rites dejectedly to his w ife a few days
later, “ the last peasant shall hold him self at least as m uch as a noble and
shall believe that he is ow ed no special regard nor any d eferen ce.”98 T he
m arquis’s counsel o f nonresistance to this odious d ecree draws on an
assessm ent o f the relative strength o f the rural m ovem ent and o f potential
forces o f o rd e r resistance, he fears, “m ay becom e the signal for a general
m assacre o f provincial nobles and for the burning o f their châteaux. T h ere is
no public force able to p rotect them .”99 Still later, w hen he set dow n his
m em oirs, the m arquis identified this abolition o f hereditary distinctions,
including, specifically, em bellishing on e's fam ily nam e w ith the nam e o f a
property, distinctive liveries and coats-of-arm s— in a w ord, the signs “ that
m ost recalled the feudal system and the spirit o f chivalry” 100 as the particular
tatter pill that w as beyond the capacity o f the nobility to sw allow . It w as the
point at w hich a nobility, patiently suffering under the dam age to their
incom es and in the m ajority accepting the new constitution w ithout regrets,
n ot only turned on the Revolution but cam e to support a “ league unifying
the nobility, the clergy and the parlements, th ese three bodies that had
d etested each oth er before the revolution.” 101 But w hile those w ho, like the
m arquis, thought the June 1790 law a respon se to the insurrectionary flare-
up o f that m onth, it w as not a con cession that decreased by one sou what
any peasant ow ed any lord. To the exten t that it w as experien ced as, in
part, a gift to antiseigneurial peasants, it w as a cheap gift. It w as also n ot a
gift that the peasants had been pressing for in the spring o f 1789, at least
97. Ferrières, Correspondance, 206.

98. Ibid.. 221.
99. Ibid., 208.
100. Ferrières, Mémoires, 2:73.
101. Ibid, 76. Alexandre Lameth, who is amongthose wealthy nobles singled out by the marquis
for blindly betraying the nobility by championing the abolition of the symbols of status distinction,
presents an account of the enactment of the law that is remarkably similar, including his judgment
of the consequences. The nobility, hitherto divided, now joined together since many were “more
sensitive to the loss of their titles than their privileges.” Lameth’s account only differs from that of
Ferrières’s in attributing the driving force “not to the people, but to the elite of the Third Estate”:
see Lameth, Histoire, 1:445-47; Ferrières, Mémoires, 2:70, 76.
on the eviden ce o f the cahiers. In the early m onths o f 1790, how ever, the
sym bolic trappings o f lordship w ere a m ore prom inent target in antiseigneur-
ial actions than they had been the previous year (se e Table 8 .3 ). S o perhaps
this gesture w as not w holly out o f step w ith developing rural rebellion.
If the abolition o f coats-of-arm s and seigneurial titles had hardly been at
the cen ter o f the peasant grievances o f the previous spring, w e have seen
in Chapters 2 -4 how preoccupied the nobility had been w ith their honor.
T he general pandem onium o f the debate o f June 19— com plete w ith cheering
spectators, exalted cham pions o f change, and furious nobles (A P 1 6 :3 7 4 -
79)— show s that for many nobles such claim s w ere h eartfelt N oble anger
and disgust filled the w ritten com plaints they subm itted.102 June 1790, in
Tim othy Tackett’s account, is the point at which significant num bers o f the
m ore conservative deputies began to drop out o f attem pting to m oderate
the Revolution from within: over the next fifteen m onths, on e noble deputy
in five em igrated, many offerin g their m ilitary experien ce to on e o r another
counterrevolutionary legion form ing in e x ile .103 O ne Third E state deputy
saw June 19 as the m om ent when “ m ost nobles o f the kingdom show ed
them selves irreconcilable enem ies o f the C onstitution.” 104
N ovem ber 1790 and April 1791 produced som e further m ovem ent in favor
o f the peasants: an easing o f the indem nification m odalities (payers o f dues
on National Land could now separately indem nify annual and occasional dues)
and an addition o f specific rights to the class o f those to be abolished
outright. Such piecem eal im provem ents, how ever, began to be called into
question by the great w ave o f antiseigneurial revolt that raged from February
into April o f 1792. A s early as February 29, Couthon called for a far m ore
radical approach than currently in p rogress and as insurrection m ounted into
April, oth ers began to speak along the sam e general lines. T he central issue
for Couthon w as that the current law, far from living up to what he
contended w as the true spirit o f August 4, 1789, actually accepted the
legitim acy o f im portant elem ents o f the seigneurial regim e. Couthon pro
p osed instead, not m erely easing repaym ent term s, but shifting many m ore
rights out o f the presum ptively legitim ate group o f the reim bursable and into
the presum ptively illegitim ate, to be abolished w ithout com pensation. This
102. AP 16:379-89, 393, 402. Many of the protests use the language of property in expressing
their outrage as the nobility had tended to do in defending their rights in the cahiers; others cite the
limited mandates of their electoral constituencies. It is noteworthy, however, that at this moment,
confronting an end to all public emblems of distinction, some refer to descent through blood, others
to claims held from God, and one, in the vocabulary of the age, refers to “nature.” See the
statements of the count de Landenberg-Wagenbourg, count dTscars, duke dHavré et de Croÿ,
count de Mazancour, and marquis de Laqueuille; AP 16:377, 380, 381, 385, 386.
103. Timothy Tackett, Beaming a Revolutionary: The Deputies of the NationalAssembly and the
Emergence ofa Revolutionary Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 294-96.
104. Jean-Paul Rabaut-Saint-Etienne, Précis historique de la Révolutionfrançaise (Paris: Itaittel
etWQrtz, 1807), 265-67.
shift in legitim acy could be institutionalized by a corresponding shift in the

burden o f p roof from peasants to lords. (Couthon’s im portant statem ent is
exam ined m ore closely later in this chapter).
A ccording to our data, the high point o f this secon d greatest w ave o f
peasant insurrection peaked on April 5; as in July 1789 this m eant that the
peak o f rep orts reaching the Legislative A ssem bly w as a few days later; and
again a w holly new p rojected law w as proposed in prelim inary form alm ost
at on ce, on April 11. Unlike the plan, carefully constructed out o f view in
the B reton Club, that failed to con trol the situation on the floor o f the
National A ssem bly on August 4 , 1789, the April 11, 1792, p roject w as put
forw ard by an official body, the Com m ittee on Feudal Rights. T he peasant
m ovem ent eased o ff and it w as now a good several m onths before the law
o f June 18-July 6 (A P 4 5 :3 3 6 -3 7 ) attem pted to put out the last w ord by
now presum ing all irregular paym ents to be illegitim ate unless the lord had
p roof to the contrary. Annual paym ents w ere still to be reim bursed; but
w ith regard to the very significant and som etim es very heavy group o f dues
paid upon land transfer due to death or sale, the entire presum ption o f
legitim acy/illegitim acy (o r con tractu al/coerdve) had been turned around; the
legal burden w ould now be on the lord.
T h e overthrow o f the m onarchy on August 10, 1792, w as the death
warrant for the L egislative A ssem bly, w hich operated by virtue o f the
m onarchical constitution o f 1791; that expiring body, how ever, in its last
w eeks, now operated under new political circum stances. In the face o f y et
another w ave o f rural unrest (this tim e a com bination o f antiseigneurial and
counterrevolutionary risings; see again Table 6 .3 ), the assem bly hastily
passed a d ecree on August 20 further easing the conditions o f indem nifica
tion .105 A m ere five days later, that d ecree w as entirely superseded by a
truly radical extension o f the principles that had been pioneered in the law
o f June 18-July 6. On August 25, 1792,106 all seigneurial dues w ere now
declared presum ptively illegitim ate; that is, they w ere understood to be the
resu lt o f coerciv e acts in the barbarous past and w ere th erefore to be
abolished outright. Should any lord have evidence to the contrary, he could
petition but the burden o f p roof was his. This law w as profoundly different
than the initial detailed legislation o f M arch 1790. N ot only w ere few er
rights now subject to indem nification under any circum stances, but the
presum ption for all seigneurial dues w as that they w ere to be abolished.
M oreover, the bitter polarization o f French society had advanced so far by
the late sum m er o f 1792 that it would seem safe to assum e that even th ose
few lords w ho m ight actually have som e docum ented case for a contractual
105. Philippe Sagnac and Pierre Caron, Les comités des droitsféodaux et de législation et tabolition
du rigme seigneurial (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1907), 768-72.
106. Ibid., 778-75.
basis for their rights (w hich m eans not only that there w ere som e such
docum ents but that th ese docum ents had not already gone up in flam es in
one o f the several w aves o f insurrection) m ight w ell fear for their safety
should they actually attem pt a cou rt case. And what sort o f cou rt hearing
w ould they hope for by the fall o f 1792?107
T h e great insurrections o f the sum m er o f 1789 had pushed the National
A ssem bly to act and assured that the existen ce o f a class o f rights to be
abolished w ithout com pensation could not b e sidestepped by a proposal like
the duke d’AiguiUon’s. T he peasant revolts, one m ight say, got the legislated
details to conform a bit m ore closely to the com m onsense m eaning o f the
abolition o f feudalism . Som ething sim ilar seem s to have happened in 1792,
but w ith a m ore radical starting and term ination p oin t T h e Couthon proposal
acknow ledged a fundam ental illegitim acy to seigneurial rights, yet his sp ecific
proposals, and the eventual legislation adopted in June and July and again on
August 20 that expanded the num ber o f rights held illegitim ate, still left
oth ers as “ p rop erty.” W hat happened betw een August 20 and August 25
that produced the m ore drastic shift to an utter reversal o f the earlier
burden o f p roof? Unlike the correspondence and m em oirs o f m em bers o f
the National A ssem bly, th ose w ho served in the Legislative A ssem bly have
not been very forthcom ing on that body’s m ajor p iece o f antiseigneurial
legislation. O ne m ay presum e that the im pact o f the new political situation
togeth er w ith the rising rural insurrectionary w ave that did not peak until
Septem ber led the expiring Legislative A ssem bly to g o beyond the sort o f
con crete m easures proposed by Couthon and oth ers and to follow his stated
principles m ore com pletely.
N onetheless, even this law, w hile hardly reassuring to holders o f seigneur
ial rights, still d eferred to the possibility that, in principle, there m ight be
such an entity as a legitim ate seigneurial claim . A lord still had the right to
attem pt to m ake a case. It seem s im probable that many thought seigneurial
rights at all viable in practice at this p oin t T h e quantity o f antiseigneurial
107. I pose this as a rhetorical question. There » little research on the degree to which ex-lords
attempted to use this legal machinery; nor has much been done on peasant lawsuits against lords
under the March 1790 law. The earlier law made virtually impossible demands on peasants for
documentation (reversed in the later law) so that one presumes that suits must have been scarce.
But peasants may have been able to raise questions about documents in the lord’s possession and
stak (The scattered and limited research is reviewed byJones, Peasantry, 106-10). If one is wttng
to assume that petitions to the legislators tap into the same propensity to seek legal redress as
petitions to a court (and if one is willing to assume that the selection of such petitions published by
Sagnac and Caron is reasonably representative), then it is worth noting that noble petitions seem
far down in 1792 from what they were in 1789 and 1790, as if nobles had simply given up on utilizing
legal channels to influence policy. For the counts of noble petitions, interesting in spite of the
minuscule sample, see Philippe Goqjard, “Les pétitions au comité féodal: Loi contre loi,” m La
Révolutionfrançaise et le monde rural (Editions du Comité des Travaux Historiques et Scientifiques,
1969), 69.
risings fell o ff after a final— and quite violent— spurt in Septem ber (se e
Chapter 6, pp. 281, 505). W hy bother to risk one’s neck w hen (m e could
now alm ost certainly ju st stop paying, since no lord could, in practice, g et
the support o f a court? But if antiseigneurial insurrection w as dying, peasant
activism w as hardly at an end. Significant w aves o f con flict over land w ere
still to com e. W age con flicts, although relatively uncom m on w ere about to
rise. And counterrevolution exploded in M arch. W hen the next great
Parisian intervention hit— the invasion o f the C onvention on M ay 31 and
June 2, 1793— the subsequent expulsion and arrest o f the G irondins on ce
again opened the w ay to a yet m ore radical approach to rural issu es. T he
C onvention, m oreover, organized its w ork on seigneurial issu es quite
differently than its p red ecessors. Follow ing the night o f August 4, the
National A ssem bly assigned the drafting o f legislation to a specialized
com m ittee dom inated by highly specialized law yers, a precedent follow ed by
the L egislative A ssem bly. T he C onvention, how ever, did w ithout such a
body, entrusting the w ork to the m ore generalist Com m ittee on Legisla
tion .106 T he C onvention, then, w as organizationally prepared to deal with
this area openly as a political problem , rather than shroud it in the m ystique
o f feudal law, the province o f specialized professionals. If one sees the w ork
o f M erlin and his associates as one o f consum m ate obfuscation— starting
w ith the central distinction o f "real” and “ personal” rights1 109— on e will be
8
0
inclined to see this organizational shift as favoring a salutary realism . M erlin,
on the oth er hand, regarded the C onvention’s legislation as unsound, as the
m ere law o f the jungle, not properly done legislation at alL110 A s radical as it
w as, the law o f August 2 5 ,1 7 9 2 , had still maintained the initial distinction o f
tw o classes o f rights, one o f which, legitim ate, w as to be indem nified, even
though the law also ensured that there w ould be none presum ptively in the
legitim ate group. T h e law o f July 1793, how ever, found only on e class and
that one illegitim ate.
T he history o f this new legislation is, in its details, effectively unknown.
On June 3— the day after the exclusion o f the G irondins— an unnamed
deputy proposed burning all docum ents justifying feudal rights (A P 6 6 :4 ) as
part o f the next m onth’s celebration o f July 14. H e w as follow ed by M éaulle
w ho proposed “ a general law that com pletes the destruction o f feudalism ”
(A P 6 6 :4 ). T h ere w as no debate (if w e credit the w ritten record ) and both
proposals w ere referred to the Com m ittee on Legislation.
Six w eeks later, the subject cam e up again, by w ay o f a m etaphor that
had becom e a clich é. T he seigneurial regim e had som etim es been com pared
108. Peter Jones points up the significance of the Convention's breaking with a specialized
committee (peasantry, 87).
109. The legislation is considered as an intellectual construction in chapter 9.
110. Garaud, Révolution etpropriétéfoncière, 227.
to a tree w ith its slow ly grow ing but im pressive trunk, its com plexly
branching offsh oots, its roots sunk deep in French history and culture.
Several deputies had discussed the night o f August 4 in th ese term s. On
August 5 ,1 7 8 9 , describing the elation he, like so many oth ers, felt the night
b efore, the deputy M ichel-R ené M aupetit w axed arboreal: “ T h e fam ous
tree o f feudalism w as knocked dow n yesterday and that night all its roots
w ere c u t “ 111 N early four years later, how ever, Isoré told the Convention
that “ the tree o f feudalism has only been pruned; w e m ust knock it dow n
roots and all, bum it and throw its cinders to the wind“ (4 P 6 9 :1 9 ). T h ere
seem s to have been som e debate about a draft law consisting o f several
articles; the accounts o f the debate and the draft differ considerably. Tw o
days later, on July 17, the seigneurial rights w ere sim ply declared abolished
(4 P 69 :9 8 ). T he crucial docum entation o f seigneurial claim s w as to be
destroyed by fire. T h ere appears to have been no debate at all and the law
enacted w as considerably m ore elaborate than the draft that som e accounts
ascribe to Isoré tw o days earlier. W as there another behind-the-scenes
m aneuver as b efore August 4 ,1 7 8 9 , only now m ore su ccessfu l in controlling
discussion? If the path is unknown, how ever, the outcom e is cle a r nearly
four years after the ever m em orable night o f August 4, it no longer took a
special state o f mind or a particular law yerly logic to find that the law really
m eant the destruction o f the feudal regim e in its entirety.
M erlin de D ouai, the architect o f the intellectual rationale for the indemni
fication p roject now in ruins, com m ented that this w as “ a law o f anger, that,
through the breach m ade in the right o f property, exp osed those im prudent
m en w ho by their clam or had provoked it, to be them selves on e day
despoiled by a new law m ade in the sam e spirit and to lose the properties
that they had acquired by extinguishing rights and d u es.” 112 M erlin saw the
danger o f sliding further dow n the slippery slope in which property-ow ning
elites w ould encourage further radicalism rather than contain it, in term s
very sim ilar to th ose uttered at a m uch earlier phase by the m arquis de
F errières (se e n ote 19). Yet this tim e, many legislators w ere prepared to
take steps not to fall further dow n that slope. T he secon d article o f the July
17, 1793, d ecree m ade an exception o f “ nonfeudal” rent (4 P 6 9 :9 8 ). T h e
difficulty o f unam biguously distinguishing the one from the oth er rem ained
But now there w as no geographically w idespread grouping o f fairly unified
peasant com m unities prepared to disrupt indefinitely. Peasant proprietors
had been freed o f seigneurial (and ecclesiastical) obligations and stood only
to benefit from a renew ed capacity to en force ren t-collection .
T he sharecroppers o f the Southw est, in rebellion since the late fall o f
1789, how ever, had been saddled w ith the neo-tith e, payable to the sam e
111. Michel-René Maupetit, “Lettres de Michel-René Maupetit,” Bulletin de la Commission

Historique etArchéologique de la Mayenne 19 (1903): 217.
112. Quoted in Garaud, Révolution d propriétéfoncière, 227.
proprietors who could m ake claim s fo r “ nonfeudal” rents. T heir fight w ent
on, but they w ere not, alone, enough to persuade legislators to g o through
w ith the legally m andated auto-da-fé o f seigneurial docum ents that contained
rental claim s as welL T he legislature’s con cern w as not only the abstract
claim s to property rights o f landholders (th ese had been continually redefined
since 1789) but also protecting claim s on state-held property. B y O ctober
2, 1793, the C onvention suspended the burning o f these docum ents.
N onetheless, the w ill to legislate a narrow ed interpretation o f the law w as
gon e, in part, perhaps, because o f the experien ce o f years o f peasant
resistance, in part, perhaps because o f the aura o f sacrality that now hung
over the legal docum ent claim ing, finally, to have abolished what w as left o f
feudalism . T he absence o f clear legislative guidance113 m eant that p olicy w as
now m ade by litigation before judges with different view s. One cou rt m ight
very strictly rule that any paym ent “ stained in its origins by the ligh test
mark o f feudalism is abolished w ithout indem nity” 114 w hile another m ight
interpret the law to p rotect ren ts.115
Southw estern sharecroppers, w ith several years o f tenacious cam paigning
behind them , continued to re sis t In this region all sorts o f paym ents w ere
intertw ined, as perhaps is suggested by use o f the w ord “ rents” as the
“ usual term in the area to refer to feudal righ ts,” as G odard and Robin
d iscovered w hen they toured the Southw est in the w inter o f 1 7 9 0 -9 1 .116
T h e legislature responded w ith a m asterpiece o f am biguity. Landow ners
could rent land in any mutually agreed upon fashion provided that rental
agreem ents didn’t look like seigneurial on es— leaving d ie varying view s o f
the cou rts a free hand.117 From 1789 M erlin had been arguing that m uch o f
what the peasants held to be feudal w as actually legitim ate property; now
southw estern peasants argued that som e o f what elites held to be legitim ate
property w as actually feu dal
How the War Revolutionized the

Revolution: Seigneurial Rights Abroad
and At Home
Peasant insurrection and w ar had com bined to ruin M erlin’s ed ifice. T h e w ar
m ade new dem ands on the countryside: dem ands for taxation, for food , for
113. A local official in Moulins wrote to the Legislative Committee for guidance as to whether
the lawrequired him to deposit the titles to National Property, presumably prior to burning (Sagnac
and Caron, "Les comités des droits féodaux,” 789).
114. Garaud, Révolution etpropriétéfoncière, 232.
115. Millot, Le régime féodale en Franche-Comté au XVIIIe siècle (Besançon: MiUot Frères,
1937), 268.
116. Godard and Robin, Rapport, 24.
117. Jones, Peasantry, 103.
draft anim als, and fo r sons. T h ese alone lent w eight to the new approach to
seigneurial rights that Couthon had begun to p ropose as w ar approached
and peasant insurrection broke out again. Couthon’s rh etoric w as openly
political. Rather than a theoretical rationale, Couthon proposed to think
about what peasants would not w ily tolerate but actively su p p ort Rather
than com plex reasonings the new approach ju st m ade a sim ple and sharp
equation o f seigneurial rights with violent usurpation, qualified slightly by a
few relatively recen t contractual arrangem ents.1U
But it was not only the m aterial burdens im posed (Hi the peasantry that
propelled the change in the structure o f the laws but the m oral burden the
legislators im posed on them selves. In identifying the Revolution with an
international crusade against laféodalité the legislature m ade o f the abolition
o f feudal regim es, generally, a national m ission. It w as part strategic
calculation to challenge loyalties oí peasant conscripts elsew h ere; part self-
deception to conceal the aggressive nature o f the French side o f the w ar,
now renounced in the new Constitution; part genuine identification with
“ liberty” ; and part identification o f the French state w ith a particular set o f
social institutions w hose superiority over the backw ard institutions o f the
antagonists was assured by their m odernity. B y the tim e o f the August 1792
legislation, the antifeudal discourse had em erged from its French cocoon to
becom e a part o f the w ar aim s o f the revolutionary arm ies, w ith the n ot-so-
inddental benefit, so it w as hoped (but rarely realized), that rebellious
peasants w ould play havoc w ith the w ar-fighting capacities o f the C oalition's
forces.
In trying to uncover the p rocess o f conflating the dism antling o f feudalism
within France w ith the confrontation o f the new France and the old E urope,
w e may turn to the language o f the legislators in dealing with tw o early
international problem s: in considering com plaints from across the Rhine, the
legislators began to connect their policies at hom e w ith troubles abroad; in
grappling with a potential war betw een Spain and Britain a half-year later,
the legislators began to cast their country, now rejuvenated, as uniquely
m oral and principled in w orld affairs. T he com plaints o f a few Germ an
aristocrats hardly threatened war; the threat o f Spanish-English w ar em
broiling France w as not triggered by anything to do with feudalism ; but
blend together elem ents o f the tw o debates and on e has the germ o f a
national m ission to end feudalism in the w orld.
Seigneurial rights becam e a central elem ent o f interstate con flict w ith the
night o f August 4. Germ an princes, w hose seigneurial claim s in A lsace w ere
guaranteed in the treaty o f M ünster o f 1648 hoped to find a pow erful backer
in the H oly Roman Em pire. T he landgrave o f H esse-D arm stadt, the bishop
o f Spire, and the duke o f W ürttem berg had already been at odds with the 1 8
118. Couthon, Discours sur le rachat, 4-5.

French governm ent over the flurry o f institutional innovation o f the pre
revolutionary period. T he new local and regional assem blies, set up in 1787
w ith sharply lim ited representation, already raised the sp ecter o f popular
sovereignty to these princes. T he tax-reform proposals o f 1787 and 1788,
the judicial reorganization o f 1788 that threatened seigneurial cou rts, and
the antifeudal discou rse in w hich public affairs w ere already being discussed
w ere issu es in A lsace even before the E states-G eneral m e t119 W hat August
4 did w as to raise these tensions, on the French side, from a problem to a
national com m itm ent From a problem that pitted local privileges against
m onarchical reform and state centralization, this con flict w as now trans
m uted in its m ore public version into a struggle o f the new epoch being bom
against the lay and clerical lords w ho fought to keep humanity in chains.
W hat m ay have appeared at first as sim ply the conflicting claim s o f French
and im perial sovereignty, appeared instead to som e in the A ssem bly as a
question o f w hether the sovereignty o f the French people (w hich the
legislators took them selves to em body) could be assigned lim its under the
treaties o f past m onarchs. W hen the Com m ittee on Feudal Rights looked
into the com plaints o f Germ an princes that French peasants w ere failing to
honor seigneurial obligations protected by the Treaty o f M ünster, M erlin,
as usual, found a legal principle to sustain the jurisdiction o f the National
A ssem bly; the social contract took p receden ce over all. Since the people o f
A lsace had n ever consented to the Treaty o f M ünster, but had participated
in the election o f the deputies that enacted the August 4 -1 1 d ecree, the
“ treaties o f princes” w ere illegal (AP 20 :8 1 ). T he plain im plication w as that
all interstate treaties to date w ere illegitim ate and no European structure o f
authority, excep t France’s, had the basis in popular consent that m ade it
w orthy o f r e s p e c t120 H ere, as in oth er pronouncem ents (Hi seigneurial
rights, M erlin’s sharp and absolute statem ent o f principle w as as radical as
the totality o f con crete m easures w as m oderate. T he D iplom atic Com m it
tee, appropriate to its m ission, took a m ore diplom atic view and proposed
com pensating the princes121 but the princes refu sed. A s it happened the
em pire w as unwilling to back the princes so that there w as no im m ediate
m ilitary action (or even an im m ediate th reat),122 but the linkage o f uncom pro
119. Pierre Muret, “L'affaire des princes possessions d’Alsace et les origines du conflit entre la
Révolution et l'Empire,” Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine 1 (1899-1900): 433-56; 566-92.
120. T. C. W. Blaming, The Origins of The French Revolutionary Wars (London: Longman,
1986), 74-75.
121. AP 20:84. The head of the Diplomatic Committee was Mirabeau who had never Heed the
developments of the night of August 4 andwho had, indeed, been conspicuously absent that evening.
122. Sydney Seymour Biro, The German Policy of Revolutionary France (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1957), 1:39-42. See abo T. C. W. Blaming, The French Revolution m Germany:
Occupation and Resistance in the Rhineland, 1792-1802 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983), 59-69;
Muret, "L'affaire des princes possessionés.”
m ising rhetorical antagonism to seigneurial rights and overturning authority

outside o f France had been forged.
T h e next intensive discussion o f France as a state am ong states took
place in M ay 1790.123 A year earlier, the general harassm ent o f British
vessels by Spanish w arships o ff the Pacific coasts o f the A m ericas escalated
into a m ajor confrontation at N ootka Sound. W hen new s from this rem ote
edge o f European im perial pow er finally arrived in London and M adrid, the
British issued threatening statem ents, the Spanish sought the backing o f
France under the B ourbon Family Com pact, and the National A ssem bly
found itself asked to support Louis XV I should he follow his sen se o f French
treaty obligations and take his kingdom into war. In a w eek o f highly charged
debate, the A ssem bly argued about the proper locus o f the pow er to
engage in w ar, the proper resp ect for treaty com m itm ents, the possible
con sequ en ces for the Revolution o f expanding the m ilitary or concentrating
its com m and, the proper purposes o f w arfare, and the triviality or grandeur
that underlay the bellicosity o f past kings. Unlike the grievances o f Rhenish
princes, the nature o f the Revolution w as not directly in question, since the
central issue w as a quarrel betw een oth er states. N onetheless, many
contributors to the discussion m anaged to connect revolution at hom e and
the European state system : w hether France as a “ nation” characterized by
“ freedom ” — w ords m uch invoked in the argum ents— could or should behave
like oth er states w as a m ajor axis o f debate. Several speakers introduced
the notion that a war for som e higher purpose w ould be a different m atter
entirely than a w ar over m ere “ interest” (another frequently invoked
con cep t) let alone a w ar initiated by the whim s o f kings. (W hen one speaker
suggested that H enri IV had been prepared to take France into w ar out o f
his “ insane passion” for P rincess de C ondé, he triggered an esoteric debate-
w ithin-the debate ov er the minutiae o f French h istory.) (4 P 1 5 :5 2 9 -3 0 ,
546, 5 7 3 -7 4 ). Pétion spoke o f the recen t Am erican w ar as “ unjust” because
it w as not undertaken “ to break the shackles o f an enslaved p eople in ord er
to free i t ” T h ose w ho took France into war only “ w ished to obtain reven ge
from a rival natiota, to humiliate it, to w eaken it Happily, in desiring nothing
beyond this goal, they have attained som ething m ore noble and m ore
desirable, the only goal that may con sole the friends o f humanity and the
public good for the blood and treasure that they expended in this w ar. T h ey
placed the light o f liberty in the N ew W orld, and this light, although hardly
noticed, shall enlighten ail the peoples o f the earth” (A P 15:538).
M any speakers developed the distinction drawn by M erlin a few m onths
b efore, betw een the treaties o f kings and the treaties o f p eop les. Fusing
this them e w ith the notion o f w ar in support o f m oral principle, baron de
123. The debate is found inAP 15:510-663. On the background of the Nootka Sound incident,
see Blaming, Origins ofthe French Revolutionary Wars, 61-62, 79-60.
M enou's b rief contribution pointed to a future profoundly different from the

p a st H e im plicitly dism issed the treaty with Spain. T h e issue for him w as
the “ju stice and m orality” o f the tw o disputants: “ w e shall exam ine w hich o f
the tw o nations is in the w rong. If it is Spain, w e m ust em ploy our m ediation
to encourage it to be flexible; if it is England, and if England refu ses to d o
ju stice, w e m ust arm not fourteen vessels, but all our land and sea forces.
And then w e shall show E urope what a war is, a w ar not o f m inisters but o f
a nation [applause interrupts the speaker]” (A P 15:518).
And, finally, m any deputies held that the representatives o f a free people
had to con trol the main elem ents o f interstate policy as w ell as dom estic
affairs. B y the tim e the discussion had concluded, m any deputies had
em braced a public rh etoric in w hich dom estic policy, relations with oth er
states, constitutional arrangem ents at hom e and position in the European
state system w ere all con n ected; in which w arfare could be justified as
support o f freedom as w ell as self-d efen se, and in which the w ays o f war
m aking o f a free people w ere seen as distinguishing that people from its
neighbors. T he specific crisis passed, but the rhetorical habit o f stressin g
the uniqueness o f French institutions and the uniquely m oral character o f
French bellicosity w ere to infuse all future discussion. And unlike the N ootka
Sound incident and the Family Com pact, the very sou rces o f tension w ere
largely seen to be France’s new institutions and its overthrow o f feudalism
in particular.
A s interstate tensions increased, th ose in France w ho favored w ar
convinced them selves that not only w ould the con script arm ies o f their
enem ies crum ble w hen confronting a free people but that the subject
peoples o f E urope would rise in em ulation o f the liberated French. Isnard’s
inflam m atory speech o f late N ovem ber 1791 linked French ém igrés and
Germ an princes in a com m on con cern w ith lost rights and w arned that “ if
foreign cou rts try to raise a war o f kings against France, w e shall raise a
w ar o f peoples against kings” (4 P 3 5 :4 4 1 -4 3 ). W hen a Prussian radical told
the L egislative A ssem bly in D ecem ber 1791 that interstate con flict would
prom pt peasants o f Germ any and Bohem ia to rise against their lord s,124 he
w as only reaffirm ing what many w ere already w ell prepared to hear. B rissot
and his political associates persistently defined the w ar they advocated as a
w ar against feudalism .125 T h ere w ere, to be sure, som e w ho proposed
coolin g the rhetorical tem perature. A s w ar neared in February 1792 the
124. AP 36:79. The speaker, Anadiarais Cloots, might have been buoyed by thoughts of the
recent peasant rising, in August 1790, in Saxony. See Jerome Blum, The End of the Old Order m
RuralEurope (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978), 337-38.
125. For example, Louvet in December 1791: “swift as lightning let thousands of our dtizen-
aoldiers hurl themselves upon the many domains of feudalism. . . . Let them stop only where
servitude ends; let the palaces be surrounded by bayonets; let the Declaration of Rights be
deposited in the cottages" (AP 36:381).
D iplom atic C om m ittee o f the Legislative A ssem bly reiterated the concilia
tory proposal o f indem nifying the Germ an princes (A P 3 9 :8 9 -9 0 ), a proposal
dism issed by M ailhe for its w eakness (4 P 3 9 :9 7 ). (If it w as w rong to
indem nify lords across the Rhine, did som e o f M ailhe’s listeners w onder
w hy it w as proper to d o so on this sid e?) And R obespierre’s attem pted
deflation o f the yoking o f liberation and European w ar is w efl know n.126
N onetheless the sen se o f national m ission prevailed. It w as to be n o m ore
than a playing-out o f th ese notions that saw French arm ies a few years later
support “ sister republics” am ong w hose defining attributes w ere proclaim ing
the abolition o f w hatever w ere the local analogues o f seigneurial rights. By
late 1792, French forces dom inated Belgium and provided a foretaste o f
what w as to com e elsew h ere: the first article o f a proclam ation o f the
founding principles o f the new ord er declared an end to feudal dues,
serfdom , and hunting righ ts.127
Until the approach o f actual w ar, m ost o f the legislation on the seigneurial
regim e still am ounted to tinkering w ith the basic structure em bodied in the
law o f August 4 -1 1 , 1789, as elaborated in the enactm ents o f M arch and
M ay 1790. W ith the interstate tensions appearing increasingly om inous,
peasant insurrection now began to suggest the failure o f the existing schem e
and the need to strike out in a w holly new direction. A s a new w ave o f rural
incidents began to m ount in February 1792, ultim ately reaching the secon d
largest peak o f the revolution in April, Couthon urged a new cou rse in the
L egislative A ssem bly. H e rem inded his fellow deputies o f the great size o f
the French arm y. But he urged them to recall that sh eer size is far less
significant than the m oral unity o f arm y and nation. T h e benefits o f the
Revolution unfortunately, had not yet been fully received in the French
countryside; village France had largely received fine w ords.
Each o f us has seen that ever m em orable night o f August 4, 1789,

w hen the C onstituent A ssem bly. . . pronounced in a holy enthusiasm
the abolition o f the feudal regim e. . . . But th ese striking decisions
w ere soon to present nothing m ore to the p eople than the idea o f a
beautiful dream , w hose deceitful illusion left nothing but regrets. It
w as . . . (xi August 4, 1789 that a d ecree w as joyou sly received in
all parts o f the em pire that abolished . . . the feudal regim e. Eight
m onths later, a secon d d ecree preserved everything o f value o f this
regim e, so that far from having served the people, the C onstituent
A ssem bly could not even retain the consoling hope o f being able to
126. “No one loves armed missionaries”; see Maximilien Robespierre, Oeuvres (Paris: Presses
Universitaires de France, 1950), 8:81.
127. Robert R. Palmer, TheAge of the Democratic Revolution: A Political History afEurope and
America, 1760-1800 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1959-64), 2:78.
on e day free them selves from the despotism o f the form er lords and
the exaction o f their agen ts.12*
Couthon alhides to the earlier w ork o f abolishing the honorffic aspects o f the
regim e while insisting on indemnities for lucrative rights: “ It is not exactly the
honorific aspects o f the feudal regim e that weigh on the people.” T hese signs
o f esteem may have outraged, dem eaned, and degraded them but it is, Couthon
goes on, the dues that are behind the peasant insurrections.12* It as now
seem ed inevitable, war cam e, it would be only sensible to alleviate sources o f
peasant discontent— to forestall further episodes erf insurrection like those that
raged in southeastern France in that winter o f 1792.1 130 “ D o you w ish,” Couthon
9
1
8
2
goes on, “to assure the prom pt return (rf taxes as well as calm disturbances?” 131
And if one hoped to have villagers submit to the draft and to fight in defense o f
d ie Revolution, it would be only prudent to ensure that the Revolution actually
m et som e o f their deep aspirations. “ We w ish,” he insists, that the people
“believe in the reign (rf liberty while they remain chained in the dependency on
their form er lords” (7).
Couthon’s speech did not m erely call for a new direction in policy, but for
a new ly pragm atic appreciation o f the dem ands o f the countryside. H e has
no in terest w hatsoever in any legal theory from which decision s am ong
particular seigneurial rights m ight appear to derive. O ne w onders if the
“ d iscou rse” he refers to as the unappreciated gift o f the Revolution to the
peasants is intended to refer specifically to the theoretical rationale elabo
rated by M erlin de D ouai (to be discussed in Chapter 9 ). A gainst a
background o f insurrection at hom e and approaching w ar abroad, the spirit
o f C outhon's rem arks found su p p ort132 On M arch 12 G olzart argued that
the A ssem bly “ m ust finally convince the people o f the countryside that the
abolition o f the feudal regim e is not an alm ost w orthless benefit” (A P
39:595). H e took up Couthon’s notion o f easing paym ent term s, but w ent
beyond Couthon in considering having the governm ent reim burse ow ners o f
chamfyart (“ the m ost revolting“ o f rights) in ord er to undercut the appeal o f
counterrevolutionaries. T h e Feudal Com m ittee w as at on ce invited “ to
review all the d ecrees on indem nification” and to recom m end a new cou rse.
On April 11, near the great peak o f the spring uprisings o f that year and
virtually on the brink o f war, the Com m ittee’s report con ceded the bank
ruptcy o f the C onstituent A ssem bly’s p olicies. T he solicitude show n the
lords by the National A ssem bly m ade a m ockery o f claim s to abolish the

129. Ibid.. 3.
130. See Tbble 7.5 on the regional aspects of this wave of insurrection.
131. Couthon, Discours sur le rachat, 8.
132. For a general treatment of the political context for the debates of spring 1792, see C. J.
Mitchell, TheFrench LegislativeAssembly of1791 (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1988), 61-69.
feudal regim e: “ It is in vain that the C onstituent A ssem bly announced that
it w as abolishing the feudal regim e it in actual practice, it let the m ost
odious burden continue [the speaker refers here specifically to m utation
fe e s]” (A P 4 1 :4 7 0 -7 4 ).
T he Com m ittee proposed abolishing m utation fe e s unless the lord had a
title dem onstrating the contractual nature o f his particular claim . W hile the
C om m ittee's proposal w as lim ited to the specific, but quite onerous, area o f
m utation fe e s ,133 let us note the radical shift in w here the burden o f p roof
lies. T he m utation fees w ere now presum ed illegitim ate, a deep reversal
that w ould pervade m ore sw eeping legislation a few m onths hence. T h e
debate that sw irled around this proposal w as profoundly sym ptom atic o f a
deeply changed clim ate. If m uch o f the debate around the d ecrees o f August
4 -1 1 had been based on the com plaint that they w ent to o far, presaging the
contraction em bodied in M erlin’s law o f M arch 1790, the debate that erupted
over the new proposal in the spring o f 1792 was around the counterproposal
that it didn’t g o nearly far enough. Taking the legislative history o f tw o years
ago as a warning o f what w as to be avoided at the present m om ent, one
deputy contended that the detailed legislation o f M arch and M ay 1790 that
translated the abolition o f the feudal regim e into practice actually “ validated
usurpations rather than suppress them .” A new approach to pacifying
peasants w as needed. A nother deputy w arned against going to o fan only
m utation rights w ere to be covered by new rules (A P 41:474, 4 8 4 -8 5 ,
4 8 7 -8 8 ). In the cou rse o f that debate, it w as d ea r that defen se o f “ property”
still carried very strong claim s. T he problem , as Couthon stated it, lay in
what legitim ate property w as. T he National A ssem bly, he argued, failed to
draw a “ suffiriently sharp distinction” betw een the usurped and the contrac
tual and th erefore “ produced a d ecree that the form er lords them selves
m ight have d ictated .” 134
Such rhetorical m inim ization o f the w ork o f the National A ssem bly infused
many o f the contributions to the debates o f spring 1792. D escribing the
champart as the seigneurial right m ost revolting to the inhabitants o f the
countryside (A P 39:595), and speaking o f m utation fe e s as “ the m ost odious
burden” (A P 4 1 :4 7 0 -7 4 ) (as w e have ju st seen the legislators d o) w ere n ot
very accurate as statem ents about the place o f such rights on the parishes’
agenda o r the firm ness o f calls fo r abolition in the cahiers o f three years
earlier (see Tables 2 .5 and 3 .4 ). Yet if one w ere to elim inate from con sider
ation th ose rights w hich had already been effectively abolished by spring
133. In singling out mutation fees from other payments, the Feudal Committee selected priedsdy
the payment most loathed by the peasants and urban elites alike in March 1789 and which had the
least support for indemnification (see Tables 3.4 and 3.6.) If there was to be a search for a revision
of the laws along the lines Couthon suggested that would do as little as possible and yet that might
be enough to satisfy the country people, the cahiers data suggest that one couldn’t have done better.
1792 from the tabulations w e exam ined in Chapters 2 and 3, both champart
and m utation fees w ould stand near the top o f rem aining rural con cern s. B y
refusing to credit earlier legislation with m eeting any desires o f the village,
the m ore radical legislators o f 1792 could claim for them selves the achieve
m ent o f breaking new ground in support o f the country people rather than
the m ore m odest claim o f follow ing through on an earlier breakthrough.
A new draft law w as proposed on the brink o f the war form ally declared
by France on April 20. T h e linkage o f the war and the struggle against
feudalism continued as a rhetorical com m onplace. C on dorcet attacked the
diplom atic proposals o f the Austrian foe for dem anding the restoration o f
“ feudal servitude” as part o f the price o f peace (4 P 4 2 :2 1 ). T h e rural revolt
died dow n after A pril, easing the need for im m ediate action, but w hen the
topic w as taken up again in June, M ailhe, a law yer from H aute-G aronne,
w ho had picked up im portant career experien ce as a seigneurial ju d g e,135
urged his colleagues to see that “ the destruction w ithout indem nity o f all the
rights is the ston e that is m issing from the foundation o f the C onstitution”
(A P 4 5 :1 8 ). W ith the w ar under w ay no one could m iss the political
significance o f M ailhe’s argum ent: “ W hen the nation shall have done for its
m em bers all that ju stice com m ands, then they shall make every effort to d o
all that the national interest com m ands.” For those w ho needed a theoretical
rationale to counter M erlin’s, M ailhe proposed regarding every right as
based on an original act o f violen ce. T h e operational m echanism M ailhe
proposed w as placing the burden o f p roof on the lords, should they claim
the contrary. A s for the criticism that this w as a preposterou s dem and since
the lords couldn’t prove any such thing, M ailhe countered by pointing out
that the identical im possible burden had been put on the peasants in the
current law (4 P 4 5 :1 7 -1 8 ).
In mid-June the G irondin leader L ouvet joined the position taken by the
M ontagnard Couthon three m onths earlier: “ We shall n ever obtain the
com plete consolidation o f our Revolution until the day w hen the last vestiges
o f serfd om . . . have forev er disappeared.” And Louvet w ent on to denounce
the w ay in w hich conception s o f property had been used to p rotect the
feudal regim e and thereby prevent peasants from fully supporting the
revolutionary o rd e r “ N one o f you, Sirs, is ignorant o f the fact that it is w ith
this w ord property that one w ished to block our p red ecessors. . . . L et us
see that w e don 't abuse this w ord h ere” (4 P 4 5 :1 1 9 -2 3 ).
In fact, both sides in th ese debates o f June w ere vigorously claim ing to be
135. Geneviève Thoumas, “La jeunesse de Mailhe," Aimaks Historiques de la Révolution

Française 43 (1971): 221-47, and Lenard R. Berianstein, The Barristers of Toulouse in the
Eighteenth Century (1740-1793) (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975), 24. Seigneurial
judgeship was often an important part of a legal career. See Maurice Gresset, Gens de justice à
Besançon: De la conqüete par Louis XIV à la Révolutionfrançaise, 1674-1789 (Paris: Bibliothèque
Nationale, 1978), 1:100.
478 THE ABOUTION OF FEUDAUSM
the defenders o f "p rop erty.” Prouveur, o f the currently peaceful départe
ment o f N ord (se e Table 7 .5 ), may have been trying to appeal to am bivalent
deputies on the left in quoting Rousseau to the e ffe ct that the man w ho had
first said o f a plot o f land, "T h is is m ine,” w as the real founder o f society ;
he w ent on to prophesy social collapse if the legislature did not accep t a
very broad m eaning o f property in ord er to cover feudal rights (A P 44:200 ).
But G ohier saw “ feudalism ” as a disease from which the m oral core o f
property rights had to be rescu ed, for feudalism m eant appropriation by
violen ce, and the passage o f the centuries could not retroactively turn that
violent act into the freely consented contract that m ust b e honored (A P
4 4 :2 0 2 ,2 0 5 ).
T he early m onths o f w ar saw the overturning o f the assum ptions o f the
initial legislation, a p rocess culm inating in the August d ecrees o f the
Legislative A ssem bly. T he new Convention continued to expound the fusion
o f struggle against foreign kings and antifeudalism . In N ovem ber 1792, the
Convention discussed “ the principles,” as B rissot put it, “ under which
France m ust p rotect all the peoples w ho dem and i t ” M ailhe in terjected that
w hatever else th ese principles m ight b e, they m ust include instructing other
people “ about the natural rights on which the destruction o f feudal rights in
France w as based .” And he w ent on to speak o f a national m ission:
“ C itizens, it is in France that feudal rights and their con sequ en ces unhappily
w ere bom ; it is from France that enlightenm ent m ust com e; it is the French
w ho m ust raise the thick veil which, am ong all our neighbors, still conceals
the fundamental rights o f nature” (A P 53:473).
Cam bon put it m ore tersely, "W hat is the purpose o f the w ar you have
undertaken? It is surely the abolition o f all privileges. W ar against the
châteaux, peace to the cottages” (A P 55:70). Even after the new thrust
em bodied in the antiseigneurial legislation o f August 1792, then, the antifeu
dal language surrounding the w ar outran the law in France. On D ecem ber
15, 1792, the C onvention d ecreed the abolition o f seigneurial rights w ith no
m ention o f any provision for lords to appeal in F rench-controlled areas o f
Belgium and G erm any.136 A proclam ation adopted by the Convention an
nounced French support for peasant insurrection outside o f France. “ Show
you rselves to be free m en and w e shall p rotect you against their ven
gean ce.” 137
T he new discussions o f seigneurial rights w ere rooted in the w ar-
prom oting rh etoric o f the G irondins, in statem ents o f w ar aim s, in p olicy
136. AP 55:75. As early as October, General Custme, operating in the Rhineland, had anticipated
the legislature in announcing his sympathy to German serfs and his antipathy to “the loathsome
feudal rights”; see Sagnac, Le Rhin français pendant la Revolution et CEmpir* (Paris: Félix Alcan,
1917), 72.
137. AP 55:101. See also Suzanne Tessier, Histoire de la Belgique sous {occupationfrançaise en
1792 et 1793 (Brussels: Librairie Falk fils, 1934).
declarations by generals in Belgium or the Rhineland, in inspirational pep

talks to the troop s. The rhetorical clim ate w as changing. If the son s o f
French villagers w ere to die to free Germ an or P iedm ontese villagers from
feudal oppression, could the legislators stick to a definition o f feudal rights
so narrow as to appear an utter fraud in rural France?198 If the C onvention
encouraged antifeudal insurrection in France’s neighbors, could it m anage to
prosecu te antifeudal peasants at hom e? If M ailhe not only supported the
w artim e proclam ation o f liberation o f occupied territories from feudal rights
that included protecting peasants from their lords’ vengeance but spon sored
am ending it to include abolishing nobility itself on D ecem ber 15, it seem s
but a m atter o f con sisten cy for him to have advocated, ten days later, that
legal proceedings against French peasants rebelling against seigneuriaksm
be dropped (AP 5 5 :7 2 -7 3 , 56:65, 74).
T h e w ar m ade it im possible to maintain the disjunction betw een the sen se
o f a radical rupture in history with a detailed specification that altered little
o f what peasants ow ed lords. In presenting the French arm ies as the agent
o f liberty in battle against the slave arm ies o f the crow ned tyran ts,1 139 the
8
3
legislators had to accept the victory o f defiant French villagers w ho doggedly
refu sed the coexisten ce o f the narrow and the broad sen ses o f the abolition
o f the feudal regim e.
Parallels and Contrasts

Legislators Deal with the Tithe
T he tithe legislation140 w as in large part an appendage o f the seigneurial
rights story. T he initial legislation recognized that in addition to ecclesiastical
tithes in the hands o f the church there w ere the infeudated tithes. T h ese
138. In the fall of 1790, the National Assembly heard of the countryside around Gourdon, where
daims were circulating to the effect that the rural National Guards wouldn’t enforce decrees held to
be fraudulent, that the new laws weren’t believed to be the work of the Assembly at all, but of the
former lords (AP 21:457). Couthon’s important speech of February 1792 is a legislator’s assertion
of a claim made earlier by southwestern sharecroppers, when he dramatically asserts that the
former lords could have written the existing legislation.
139. A little past the time-frame considered here, with French armies wd beyond the old
borders, very traditional sorts of power-enhancing arguments for national expansion were invoked.
The same Merlin de Douai who had so dramatically rejected the treaties of princes in 1789 in favor
of the will of the people of Alsace, how, on September 22, 1795, championed the annexation of
Belgium in order to move the frontier far north of Paris and with no consideration of consulting the
Belgians; see Sagnac, Le Rhinfrançais, 123.
140. Henri Marion, La dùne ecclésiastique en FranceauXVWesücle et sa suppression (Bordeaux:
Imprimerie de l'Université et des Facultés, 1912).
latter w ere largely assim ilated to the antiseigneurial legislation and thereby
underw ent sim ilar m utations in the rules o f indem nification as opp osed to
outright abolition until finally abolished unconditionally along w ith the sei
gneurial rights in July 1793. T he ecclesiastical tithes, on the oth er hand,
follow ing som e bitter debate, w ere slated for unconditional abolition by the
law o f August 4 -1 1 , 1789. This outright abolition m eant an im m ediate
windfall for som ebody and w hether that som ebody w as to be a landow ner
or that landow ner’s tenant w as a m atter o f great con sequ en ce.141 T he
windfall would begin at the date at which the tithe w as no longer to b e paid,
set for 1791 by the law o f April 1 4 -2 0 , 1790 (AP 12:745). T h e law
(pu rposely?) did not specify how the windfall w as to be distributed, w hich is
rem iniscent o f the vagueness in the law on seigneurial rights the previous
m onth that had specified the rights to be indem nified but not the rates.
Rather than perm it a renegotiation o f contracts, leaving the distribution o f
the windfall to the m arket, the National A ssem bly awarded the entire
windfall to the proprietors (law o f D ecem ber 1 -1 2 , 1790).142 T h e m echanism
for enriching the proprietors w as to require that sharecroppers and cash
tenants w ho had previously paid the tithe now w ere to add its value to their
rents. W hile proprietors m ight have been quite content w ith this “ n eo-tith e,”
their tenants w ere unlikely to be so enthusiastic. Thus the revolutionary
legislatures helped prepare the w ay for a shift in the locus o f rural conflict
away from peasant com m unities against lords and tow ard class struggles
within th ose com m unities.143
141. Unlike the case of the infeudated tithe, indemnification was not to be required of peasants,
since the state would now take charge of ecclesiastical affairs and finance them out of tax revenues.
Note that this is in the general spirit of the parish cahiers that grant the tithe to have at least the
virtue of supporting a communally valued function (see Chapter 3, p. 109). As with the seigneurial
rights, the question of how to actually get peasants to continue to pay any sort of interim tithe
pending the definitive abolition was not resolved by all the hortatory injunctions to patriotism, aBthe
reasoned attempts to convince peasants the Revolution was on their behalf, etc.
142. AP 21:170. To avoid seeing the legislature as self-consciously stacking the decks in favor of
a rural elite even more than they in fact did, we need to recall that the December rule only applied
to the allocation of the benefits of the abolition among the parties to current leases. Future terms
of tenancy were wide open to the fortunes of lease negotiation. On the other hand, most leases
were fairly long-term. While it would be difficult to imagine a group for whom “property” was
“sacred” voiding existing contracts, it is possible to imagine a different spät oí the tithe than
0-100%. (The best account of the “neo-tithe" is Jones, Peasantry, 94-103.) As a Third Estate
instance of property as “sacred,” see the cahier of the Third Estate of Cahors, AP 3:491; on the
sacrafity of property for the nobOity, see Chapter 2.
143. Complaints received by the Committee on Feudal Rights show a dear expectation that the
tithe legislation was planting the seeds of open dass conflict in the countryside. According to one
analysis “all the proprietors think that the lot of the sharecropper ought in no way be changed for
the better; ” another contends that “the small fanners . . . say openly that, far from estabkshuig
liberty, this measure revives servitude and tyranny” (Sagnac and Caron, Les comités des droits
féodaux, 347, 353).
The Battle for Land: Landsales and Legislative Initiatives

T he trajectory o f legislation on ow nership o f and access to land is consider
ably m ore com plex than that o f the tithe. T h ere is an exten sive scholarly
literature and one full o f disagreem ent on the nature o f con flicts over land
policy at both the level o f the village and the level o f the legislatures. I shall
only touch on som e o f th ese issu es h ere. Roughly speaking, w e m ay divide
the broad question o f a ccess to land into four areas o f legislative action.
T h ere w ere first o f all a h ost o f questions about National P roperty, the lands
o f church and king (and later o f ém igrés) to be sold, sim ultaneously providing
resou rces to the depleted treasury and creating a class o f purchasers
com m itted to the Revolution. W ere the term s o f sale to be set to favor the
state finances o r the purchaser’s d esire for a bargain? W ere they to be set
to favor larger o r sm aller acquirers? Second, there w ere a large num ber o f
com m unities at odds with their lords, especially over the use o f pasture and
forest; their com bat had been taking place in the cou rts as w ell as in land
invasions. N o legislative program on the seigneurial regim e could be com
plete w ithout tackling th ese associated issu es o f rights ov er land. Third,
there w ere issu es around the continuation o f com munal constraints on
en closu res, technology, planting dates, and the like; the advanced econom ic
th eorists had w anted to elim inate these constraints but had largely been
stym ied by m ultiple form s o f resistance b efore the Revolution. Finally, there
w as the question o f the com m unal land: w as it to b e p reserved as collectiv e
property or divided, and if divided, how ?
T he m ultiplicity and com plexity o f these issu es assured a vast stream o f
legislation, w hich I shall not attem pt to trace in any detail144 but I d o want to
suggest the m ajor parallel and m ajor contrast w ith the legislative respon se
to insurrectionary antiseigneurialism . T he parallel, first: the legislative
actions tended to follow the rhythm s o f peasant insurrection generally so
that m ajor turning points often m oved in tandem w ith legislation on seigneur
ial rights. T h e initial law on sale o f National P roperty, for exam ple, provided
for the seized lands o f church and king to be sold at auction in large plots
(4 P 1 5 :5 0 6 -8 ). This m ajor act, plainly favoring the w ell-to-do, follow ed
alm ost im m ediately upon the very conservative legislation setting the term s
o f seigneurial indem nification (M ay 3 -9 ). In the w ake o f August 1792's
upheaval, the C onvention suddenly m ade com m on land oth er than w oods
divisible by unspecified m echanism s to be set up at on ce, still another
instance o f a dram atic law that deferred central issu es to the future. N ot
having set up any m echanism s, how ever, the law w as revoked in O ctober.
On the oth er hand, the law o f August 28-S eptem ber 14 w as m ore d ecisive
about w hose w as the con tested land in disputes o f lords and peasants. Any
144. For excellent surveys, see Jones, Peasantry, and Garaud, Révolution etpropriétéfoncière.
com m on land taken by the lord since 1669 w ith or w ithout a daim legally
valid at the tim e, w as awarded to the peasant com m unity.145 This follow ed
hard upon the reversal o f the balance o f p roof in con tested antiseigneurial
cases that effectively ended the capacity o f m ost lords to collect m ost o f
their rights. B y the fall o f 1792, then, thé antiseigneurial aspect o f land law
w as w ell developed but the balance o f individual and com munal claim s was
oscillating unstably. Follow ing the great political change that left a m ore
radicalized C onvention after the Paris m ilitants opened the w ay by their
insurrection o f M ay 31, 1793, for the rem oval o f the G irondins, cam e the
tw o d ecrees o f June: on June 3, ém igré land w as now nationalized and added
to royal and ecclesiastical property; and National P roperty w as to be sold at
auction in small plots, thereby perm itting p oorer peasant strata than before
to com pete for land.146 This w as ju st on e m onth before the definitive
antiseigneurial d ecree. Thus the tim ing— and the radicalism — o f land law
roughly paralleled the tim ing and radicalism o f law on seigneurial rights.
T he secon d m ajor point, and the great contrast with the dialogue o f
peasants and legislators ov er the seigneurial rights, is the degree to which
issu es o f land a ccess tended to be divisive inside the peasant com m unities,
a divisiveness that grew w ith the very su ccess o f antiseigneurialism . Land
con flicts (se e Chapter 5) initially in fact w ere hard to distinguish from
com m unal battles w ith lay and ecclesiastical lords: peasants w ould drive
their animals over the lord’s fields or w ould cut dow n trees in a m onastery’s
forests. If on e m ay speak o f land con flicts w ith an antifeudal elem ent, one
145. Georges Bourgin, Le partage des biens communaux (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1908),
397, 398-99, 404-5.
146. The laws of June 3, 1793, and September 13, 1793, included two measures that appeared
aimed at the poorest rural stratum: first, the right for vâagers with no common land to rent émigré
land at low rates and, second, the provision of a voucher for 500 livres for the poor to bid for land.
But these laws seem to have been sometimes ignored by the peasants and were generaly
inadequate. Few plots sold for under 500 livres, for example. (See AP 66:10, arts. 2 and 3; and
Jones, foasantry, 154-61, on these provisions as weO as a general assessment of the land sales.)
There is a certain parallel here to the gap between word anddeed that also permeates the legislation
on seigneurial rights. Providing the landless with 500 livre vouchers that couldn’t actually purchase
anything has some resemblance to a total abolition of feudalism that changed peasant obligation very
little. If the poorest benefited little, however, there were many regions where less poor peasants
got significant amounts of land (although there were others where they were outbid by urban
bourgeois and even ex-lords). Philip Dawson has recently shown that in the region around Paris,
not only were the mqjor purchasers prosperous urbanites, even after the law of July 17, 1793, but
among peasant purchasers, the lion's share went to the upper stratum of independent proprietors
and large renters, thefermocratie thatJessenne has shown triumphed in village politics in the 1790s;
see “La vente des biens nationaux dans la région parisienne," inLa Révolutionfrançaise et le monde
rural (Paris: Comité des Travaux Historiques et Scientifiques, 1989), 235-51. On the other hand,
PeterJones has found some important local instances of genuine efforts at putting land in the hands
of the landless; see “The ‘Agrarian Law1: Schemes for Land Redistribution During the French
Revokakn,” tost andPresent, no. 133 (1991): 96-133.
m ay observe the rise and fall o f such incidents in Figure 8 .2 w hich show s
that they follow in very stark form the general antiseigneurial pattern with
sharp peaks in July 1789 and April 1792. A s com m unities threw o ff the hand
o f the lord the rew ards for unity declined. A t the sam e tim e the differen ces
am ong villagers becam e increasingly salient as legislatures m ade land avail
able to larger, but not sm aller, landholders; as the tithe, abolished, turned
out, from the point o f view o f tenants and sharecroppers to continue to exist
under the nam e o f rent; and as free-m arket food policies favored th ose
w ith a m arketable surplus. On land-access questions, then, the legislators
w ere— and increasingly s o — dealing w ith a divided peasant w orld, by con
trast w ith seigneurial rights.
Figure 8 .3 show s an irregularly but clearly rising developm ent o f battles
over land within the rural com m unity itself. T he com m on in terests that had
united the villages against the lords w ere w eakening, partly because that
battle w as being w on; it w as also, perhaps, because revolutionary legislation
favored the endow ed o f village France. T h ese intracom munal land con flicts
by no m eans ev er achieved the num bers o f the earlier land struggles against
lords and m onasteries, but they m arked a shift in the nature o f rural politics.
T he intracom m unal con flict m ade it quite difflcult for a single m easure to
satisfy the broad range o f peasant in terests on land issu es on ce the com m on
interest in opposing the lords was exhausted. L egislative action w ould,

th erefore, tend to alienate elem ents o f rural France. T he political discom fort
o f the legislators show ed up in both delay and contradictory legislation.
Although a legislative com m ittee w as set up early to draft a com prehensive
land law it m oved at a pace even slow er than the dilatory C om m ittee on
Feudal Rights that had taken half a year betw een August 1789 and M arch
1790. O nly by August 1790 did the com m ittee have a draft land p rop osal;1471 8
4
debate only began eleven m onths later and not until three m ore m onths had
elapsed was som ething actually enacted: the law o f Septem ber 2 8 -O ctob er
6, 1791, w hich m anaged to be even m ore am biguous than the seigneurial
legislation (A P 3 1 :4 3 1 -3 8 ). It sim ultaneously upheld the right o f grazing the
com m on herd and the right o f en closu re. T he m ore extrem e version s o f
grazing rights— intercom m unal grazing— w ere upheld "p rovision ally," but,
quite unlike the tithe, with no term ination date sp ecified .14*
147. Jones, Peasantry, 131.

148. Enclosing takes priority over grazing since it “derives essentially from [the right] of property
and may not be challenged” (sect 4, art 4). This appears to mean that those with well-founded
rights to pasture their animals can continue to do so “provisionally” (sect 4, art 2) unless sotneooe
doesn’t want them to; see AP 31:432.
The Battle for Land: Divided Communities and Division

of the Commons
T h e issue o f the com m on lands w as a particularly knotty problem . For all
the uncom prom ising agrarian individualism o f the cahiers, the assem blies
found legislation a difficult m atter indeed. T he A griculture C om m ittees o f all
three revolutionary legislatures w ere, consistently, forum s for radically
physiocratic view s favoring freedom s from com m unal and governm ental
constraints fo r rural property ow ners (con ceived as individual person s rather
than collectivities) and, ju st as consistently, hesitant in the extrem e in
initiating and prom oting legislation.149 U ncertain as to peasant view s, in
O ctober 1790 and again in N ovem ber 1791, the governm ent asked com m uni
ties for their opinions. T h ey turned out to have many (a circum stance that
seem s to have further inhibited legislation ).150 But by 1792, intracom m unal
clashes had risen anyway, despite the legislative efforts to stay out o f the
w ay (se e Fig. 8 .3 ).
W ith rising rural disturbances in 1793 again leading to new attention to
peasant con flicts, the M arch peak o f counterrevolution w as accom panied by
the death d ecree for advocates o f redistribution.151 T he notion o f an “ Agrar
ian Law ,” an expression suddenly current that evoked the redistributive
p olicies o f the G racchi tw o thousand years earlier, w as taken as sedition in
the extrem e, and n ever m ore so than under the com bination o f w artim e
pressu res and counterrevolution.152 But the C onvention also renew ed its
attention to its ow n, controlled redistribution in the area o f com m on lands
as w ell as the sales o f National P rop erty.153 Indeed, on M arch 18 B arère
149. Vida Aznni, “Un instrument de politique agricole: Les comités d’agriculture des assemblées
révolutionnaires,” in La Révolution française et le monde rural (Paris: Comité des Travaux Histori
ques et Scientifiques, 1989), 483-91.
150. Jones, Peasantry, 138-41.
151. “The National Convention decrees the death penalty against whoever proposes an agrarian
law or any other law that subverts property, whether territorial, commercial or industrial” (AP
60:292).
152. Thomas Lindet, for example, wrote to his brother, currently in the Legislative Assembly
(and later member of the Committee of Public Safety), in the wake of the August 1792 overthrow
of the monarchy: “The Revolution leads us far. so let’s watch out for agrarian law”; Robert-Thomas
Lindet, Correspondance de Thomas Lindet pendant la Constituante et la Législative (1789-1792)
(Paris: Armand Montier, 1899), 370. The connotations of the phrase “agrarian law” are explored in
R. B. Rose, "The ‘Red Scare’ of the 1790s: The French Revolution and the ‘Agrarian Law,’ ” Ast
and Present, no. 103 (1984): 113-30. Fear of redistributionist ideas was central to the Directorial
campaignto suppress Babeuf; see R. B. Rose, GracchusBabeuf: TheFirstRevolutionary Communist
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1978), 221, and Florence Gauthier, “Loi Agraire” in Diction
naire des usages socio-politiques (1770-1815) (Paris: Société Française d’Etude du 18ème Siècle,
1987), 2:65-98.
153. Peter M. Jones, “The ‘Agrarian Law’: Schemes for Land Redistribution During the French
Revolution,” BastandPment, no. 133 (1991): 96-133.
proposed, along with the death d ecree, a series o f m easures that, in

conjunction, w ere explicitly designed to secu re the allegiance o f both the
rich and the p oor in the countryside. Arguing that priests and ém igrés w ere
encouraging the have-nots to rise against the haves, he not only urged the
Convention to p rotect the w ell-off by silencing those w ho m ight be after
their w ealth. F or the land-poor he urged redistribution o f com m on land with
each receivin g an equal share regardless o f age o r sex; dividing National
P roperty into small plots for resa le;154 a progressive incom e tax; and p oor-
relief m easures. Only the death d ecree in defen se o f the rural rich was
adopted on the spot (ov er M arat’s objection ); the oth er parts o f the package,
those that favored the poor, w ere referred to various com m ittees.155
A m ore com prehensive approach, the term ination o f this long series o f
hesitations and false starts, how ever, follow ed in the w ake o f the G irondin
expulsion along with the oth er strong rural m easures o f June and July 1793.
B y the law o f June 10, 1793 (A P 6 6 :2 2 5 -3 0 ) (on e w eek after the easing o f
the term s o f purchase o f National P roperty), the peasant com m unity was
given the right to decide for itself on partition o f the com m ons, thereby
avoiding having the governm ent overtly take sides in increasingly active
intracommunal con flicts. T he long-dorm ant, but very real, individualistic
propensities o f the various assem blies, how ever, w ere exp ressed in three
w ays. In the first place, the decision rule favored division: only one-third
had to vote for partition. Second, a decision for partition was irrevocable.156
Third, in the clim ate o f the sum m er o f 1793 and beyond, fear o f the state,
w hose p referen ces for “ liberty” and against “ feudalism ” w ere w ell know n,
would seem to have been a strong inducem ent to vote the politically
correct line.
Legislative Silence: Agricultural Labor

In respon se to the quasi-unity within rural com m unities and the persisten t
and num erous m obilizations on seigneurial rights, the legislature drafted
many d ecrees, ultim ately acceding to the m ovem ent for abolition. In dealing
w ith strife within the village com m unity, the legislators confronted a m ore
divided rural w orld, (Hie that m ounted less persistent and less num erous
challenges. Som e resu lts are vacillation, contradiction, and delay as w e have
seen on land issu es. A nother possible option is silen ce: a legislative practice
by defau lt T he civil cod e that stabilized under N apoleon, as S erge Aberdam
154. A large proprietor, Barère contended, would not fight counterrevohitioaaries to the death
to hold onto anaddition to his lands but a poor person who acquires a small plot could be counted on.
155. AP 60:290-93. It is at the tail end of his series of proposals to secure the support of
conflicting rural groups in the face of counterrevolution that Barère broaches the possibdity of a new
coordinating body, “a committee of public safety."
156. See art 10, AP 66:227.
points ou t,157 sim ply says nothing about rural w age labor o r sharecropping
arrangem ents w hile it d oes regulate cash tenancy. B oth categories o f
socioecon om ic relations, Aberdam suggests, w ere only im plicitly rather than
explicitly ordered. Rural w age labor w as im plicitly taken as a com m odity
and th erefore regulated by portions o f the civil cod e that structured the
m arketplace for other com m odities. In particular, rural laborers w ere barred
from joining forces into defensive or proactive collectivities by the L e
Chapelier Law o f M arch 1791. T he sam e L e Chapelier w hose im probable
election to its presidency on August 3, 1789, gave the National A ssem bly’s
left som e con trol over the agenda on the eternally celebrated August 4, lent
his nam e to the law that for a century barred legal recognition o f w orker
associations. The profound elem ent o f con sisten cy is the individualistic and
anticorporate th ru st
Legislators Respond to Peasants

L et us now survey the overall pattern o f agrarian legislation in relation to
rural insurrection. In Figure 8 .4 , I display the tim ing o f m ajor p ieces o f
legislation on the seigneurial regim e, the tithe and a ccess to land in the form
o f short vertical lines at the dates at which the legislature initiated action on
the texts w e have m entioned. I do not differentiate on e enactm ent from
another h ere, either by subject or im portance, oth er than to m ake clear the
tem poral location o f the four m ost significant antiseigneurial m om ents in the
various assem blies. I also display sim ultaneously som e im portant elem ents
o f the insurrectionary con text, nam ely the rise and fall o f antiseigneurial
even ts, anti-tithe even ts, and land con flicts. All three are drawn on scales
such that each has an identically tall peak because the relative significance
o f the three sorts o f even ts is not to the point h ere. M ajor clu sters o f
legislation, as w e suggested above, follow , w ith som e variation in lag, m ajor
bouts o f rural activism . The eternally celebrated night o f August 4 follow s
alm ost im m ediately upon the great July peak in all three sorts o f even ts; the
January 1790 spike o f antiseigneurial even ts is follow ed a tat later by a rash
o f d ecrees o f various sorts; so is the June peak in anti-tithe and land
con flicts. T h e April 1792 spike in antiseigneurial even ts and land con flicts
and the anti-tithe rising o f the previous m onth are follow ed several m onths
later by a variety o f m ajor changes. A fter a little spurt in Septem ber 1792,
antiseigneurial even ts fäll o ff for good ; and anti-tithe even ts never rise after
157. Serge Aberdam. Aux origines du code rural, 1789-1900: Un stiele de dibat (Paris: Institut
National de h Recherche Agronomique, 1981-82), 2-4. This paragraph is very indebted to
that essay.
M ardi 1792, leaving the field to the m oderate peaks in land con flict o f late
1792 and early 1793. If som e form o f rural even t is actually im pelling the
m ajor legislation o f June and July 1793, it is surely not any o f the even ts
depicted h ere; presum ably it is the great counterrevolutionary w ave o f
M arch.
It is w ell w orth reflectin g chi this last point, at on ce curious and instructive.
T he August 1792 legislation is follow ed by an antiseigneurial spurt in
Septem ber after w hich antiseigneurialism all but disappears from collective
peasant action. T he August legislation had effectively ended the seigneurial
system in practice, since few lords could produce the evidence now required
to even lay claim to indem nification. E ven w ith little peasant pressu re now
exerted for further legislative change in seigneurial rights, the C onvention,
finally, declared the total abolition o f the feudal regim e in July 1793. In
fighting counterrevolution and the F irst Coalition sim ultaneously, what w as
left o f seigneurialism w as to be given up; but generalized land redistribution
w as not in the cards. In short, the 1793 developm ents point up one o f the
features o f the dialogue o f insurrectionary countryside and revolutionary
______ antiseigneurial events
Fig. 8.4 Timing o f Major Legislative Initiatives on Seigneurial Regime, Tithe and A ccess
to Land, and o f Insurrections over Those Issues
legislature: if the peasants pushed hard, what they got w as the abandonm ent
o f seigneurial rights even if they pushed in other directions.
Peasants Respond to Legislators

W e have focu sed , so far, in this chapter on the legislative side o f the dialogue
but there w as a peasant side as w e ll The people o f the French countryside
altered their actions in light o f their assessm ents o f the risks o f action and
the likelihood o f su ccess. T o grasp their patterns o f m obilization w e need,
ju st as w e did for the legislators, a sen se o f their grievances at the on set o f
the revolutionary p rocess (furnished by the cahiers); w e need a sen se o f the
variety o f targets and form s o f action that the varied nature o f France’s rural
w orlds fostered ; w e need to see the w ays in which the actions o f on e rural
group altered the w orld o f the others so that through em ulation, fear, or
rivalry, incidents had a ripple e ffe c t But no account o f the con texts o f
peasant action could begin to be com plete if it ignored the w ays in w hich
legislative program s altered the form s and targets o f France’s m obilized
countryside. T h e lesson that, if they dared to fig h t it w ould be on the
seigneurial rights that they could w ell win, w as, 1 su g g est a m essage that
active peasant com m unities learned.
Such an approach forces us to see the people o f the villages as engaged
in reasoned action, w hich by no m eans im plies an absence o f em otion or the
eschew ing o f violen ce. This would not be w orth pointing out w ere it not for
the persisten t thread in the literature that attributes an unthinking character
to them . This attribution w as already far advanced in the Revolution itse lf,158
as on e or another deputy described the frightening rural scen e as “ anarchy”
and its m ilitants as “brigands” w hose m otives needed only to be deplored
158. On the persistent attribution, by the educated, of disruptive rural politics to peasant lack of
“enlightenment” and the consequent proposal to reduce conflict through educational campaigns, see
Jean Bart, “Bourgeois et paysans: La crainte et le mépris,” in La Révolution française et le monde
rural (Paris: Comité des Travaux Historiques et Scientifiques, 1989), 459-75. In a study of
revolutionary cartoons, Antoine de Baecque suggests that after the first summer of Revolution, in
which peasant figures represented either satisfied concord or the revolt of the oppressed, the
Revolution was only rarely personified as a peasant It was a citizen-deputy or an urban sans-culotte
who was made to stand for the achieved Revolution. The early peasant figure was either a beneficent
receiver of revolutionary achievements or a mindless destroyer driven by misery: controlled change
was the work of others. See Baecque, “La figure du paysan dans l’imagerie révolutionnaire,” in La
Révolution française et le monde rural (Paris: Comité des Travaux Historiques et Scientifiques,
1989), 477-81. For a similar view see Michel IfoveDe, “The Countryside and the Peasantry in
Revolutionary Iconography,” in Alan Forrest and Peter M. Jones, ReshapingFrance: Town, Country
andRegionDuringtheFrenchRevolution (Manchester Manchester University Press, 1991), 26-36.
rather than explored and understood.199 Such im ages could even be used
m etaphorically as in the count de M ontlosier’s characterization o f the night
o f August 4: “ T h e w ork o f brigands w as thus sanctioned by a different
brigandage."190 From the abbé Barbotins’s disgust with "peasant id iots"191
to M erlin’s condescension tow ard understandably resentful cultivators gone
astray (A P 1 1 :4 9 8 -9 9 ), the revolutionary legislators them selves, when
frustrated by rural persisten ce in undesired actions, found som ething lacking
in the peasants’ understanding (rather than in their ow n). Thus M erlin’s
contention from 1789 on that m ost seigneurial dues w ere property w as
another confirm ation o f his brilliant legal mind192 w hile sharecroppers' con
tention after July 1793 that som e rents w ere feudal w as another confirm ation
o f their ignorance (se e above, p. 469).
O r consider the con cern s expressed at the beginning o f April 1791 by the
law yer L -F . L egendre, sent to the E states-G eneral by the Third E state o f
B rest, as he considered the dangers p osed by the “fanaticism ” o f the
refractory clergy: “ T he tow ns will easily reject the efforts o f this intrigue.
. . . But how m uch m ust w e fear the dangerous effects in the countryside
w here w eak intellects m ay be attracted as E aster n ears.” 1 1631
2
0
6
9
5 5T h e future
4
6
M ontagnard, Thom as Lindet, could w rite to his brother, the future m em ber
o f the Com m ittee o f Public Safety, o f the stupidity o f the p eople o f A lsace
on w hich the counterrevolutionaries co u n t194 On the brink o f the great
counterrevolutionary explosion a deputy distinguishes am ong the rebels in
the Sarthe: on the on e hand, “ the ignorant and credulous m ajority,” on the
other, the “ disorganizers” and “ genuine m ischief-m akers” (AP 58:149). And
occasionally the peasants are sim ple but innately m oral: noble savages.196
159. Consider this exchange in the National Assembly, engaged in discussing a report oo the
insurrectionary wave of early 1790 (Maximilien Robespierre, Oeuvres [ed. Marc Bouloiseau,
Georges Lefebvre and Afoert Soboul], voL 6, Discours [Paris: Presses Universitaires de Fnnce,
19501,228):
R o b e s p ie r r e : M. Lanjuinais has proposed that we exhaust al possible routes to conrifatinn
before employing military force against the people who burned the châteaux.
D ’E p r e s m e n il : They are not the People [one can almost hear the capital P]; they are brigands.
R o b e s p ie r r e : I f you wish I shall speak o f citizens accused o f having burned the châteaux.
De F o u c a u l t and D ’E p r e s m e n il : Say brigands.
R o b e s p ie r r e : I sh a ll o n ly u se th e w o rd “ m en ” an d I s h a l a d e q u a te ly c h a ra c te ris e th e s e m e n
w h e n I sp e a k o f th e c rim e o f w h ic h th e y a re a ccu se d .
160. Montlosier, Mémoires, 1:235.
161. Barbotin, Lettres, 52.
162. See, for example, Duquesnoy, Journal, 2:426.
163. L-F. Legendre, “Correspondance de Legendre,” La Rhobdion Française 40 (1901): 62.
164. Lindet, Correspondance, 252.
165. “The peasant of Brittany, very wild in general, very little dvüized, is nevertheless human,
good andjust” (Duquesnoy, Journal, 2:346). Even deputies sympathetic to peasant demands reveal
none of the capacity for reflection on their own sense of distance that characterized the famous
observation of La Bruyère one century earlier “One sees certain wild animals, males and females
A lexandre Laroeth thought continuing rural unrest due to a com bination

o f rural ignorance and absence o f effective force: “ T he National A ssem bly
has, th erefore, resolved to explain the m eaning [o f its d ecrees] so that they
shall be accessible to all in tellects.” M artial law w as insufficient because the
countryside had “ a total lack o f m eans o f repression ” ; peasants th erefore
had to be persuaded.*166
Finally con sider the report o f G odard and R obin,167 dispatched to the
Southw est by the National A ssem bly to investigate the continuing insurrec
tion. T h ey bring back a detailed rep ort urging that the sm all num ber o f
“ instigators” b e dealt w ith by force, but that the great m ajority o f peasants,
w ho have been led astray through their m isunderstanding o f the law, be
properly instructed so that they appreciate that under the law o f indem nifi
cation, their ex-lord s have property rights w orthy o f re sp e ct Thorough
investigators as they are, G odard and Robin consider a rival hypothesis
offered by local officials. T h ose officials, the investigators dutifully rep ort,
are o f the view “ that the principal cause o f the insurrection, perhaps, is
found in the country people’s surrender to the d esire and the hope to be
freed forev er o f the seigneurial dues” (136). A fter considering the eviden ce,
gathered in the cou rse o f several w eeks o f speaking w ith peasants, they still
adhere to their ow n view o f a countryside fundam entally d ocile but m isled.
But they are not w ithout doubts.
T h e Revolution itself, then, fostered a view o f insurrectionary peasants
intellectually incapable o f grasping the significance o f the w ise acts o f the
law givers, particularly w hen overw helm ed by em otion through the nefarious
influence o f m alicious conspirators. In fact, peasant action w as as responsive
to developm ents in the legislatures as legislative action w as to new s from
the countryside. D iscussion o f legislative politics traveled far and w ide.
T he openness o f the session s them selves, w ith spectators m ingling with
legislators in w ays that shocked advocates o f British parliam entarism ;168 the
sudden proliferation o f a new journalism w hose rapid and public accounts o f
the high and m ighty w ere sanctioned by the very claim s o f the revolutionar
ies to be subm itting them selves to the stem scrutiny o f the pu blic;169
alike, scattered through the countryside, foul, discolored like a bruise and thoroughly sunburned,
attached to the land that they dig up and stir with an unconquerable stubbornness; they have
something almost resembling an articulate voice and when they stand upright they show a human
face; and in fact they are human; they withdraw at night into their holes where they live on black
bread, water and roots; they spare other men the pains of sowing, laboring and gathering in order
to live and they therefore deserve not to lack some of this bread that they have sown”; see Jeande
la Bruyère, Les caractères ou les moeurs de ce stick (Paris: Lefèvre, 1843), 333-34.
166. Lameth, Histoire, 1:346.
167. Godard and Robin, Rapport.
168. Young, 7Yavels mFrance, 315.
169. Jeremy D. Popkin, Revolutionary News: The Press m France, 1789-1799 (Durham: Duke
University Press, 1990); Hugh Gough, The Newspaper Press m the French Revolution (London:
the com petition am ong m any journalists in claim ing accurate repenting o f
legislative d eb a te;170 the loosely linked netw ork o f thousands o f political
d u bs; the correspon den ce o f deputies and their constituents; and the
proliferation o f election s for local, departm ental, and national positions
guaranteed a considerable circulation o f new s o f the cen ter into the periph
ery. T h e hunger o f local groups for new s could lead them to badger w eary
legislators for m ore d etails.171 To what exten t did all this new s penetrate
the village? If w e accept Eugen W eber’s vivid im age o f rural France a
century la ter,172 w ith its self-im m ersed village, isolated in a culture drawing
m ore on folklore than current even ts, and a politics m ore local than national,
one m ight w onder w hether all this revolutionary new s ju st passed over
village France from on e urban p ock et to another. This is conceivable, and
no doubt approxim ates the reality in som e (daces, but it is extrem ely
doubtful as a generalization. E ven m odest electoral participation rates show
som e aw areness o f national even ts in the countryside and early in the
Revolution th ose rates w ere on a par with urban ones— or even surpassed
them .173 T he netw ork o f political action groups tied to one another in large
regional netw orks extended into som e five thousand rural com m unities.174
T he parish cahiers show considerable rural focu s on national issu es already
in place at the on set o f the revolutionary p rocess (se e Chapter 3, pp. 136 et
s e q .). Throughout the eighteenth century, indeed, rural com m unities
show ed a considerable capacity to identify pow erful institutions that fostered
or dam aged their in terests.175 Even taking into account barriers o f language,
Routledge, 1988); Claude Labrosse and Pierre Rétat, Naissance dujournal rteohe&mruàn (Lyon:
Presses Universitaires de Lyon, 1989).
170. Lehode/s technically inventive Journal Logographique used a team of observers to try
collectively to catch each word of the debates in its bid for an edge over many other periodicals that
stressed interpretation. See Fopkin, RevolutionaryNews, 106-23; Gough, NewsfxperPress, 182-83.
171. Legendre, “Correspondance,” La Révolutionfrançaise 39 (1900): 528-29.
172. Eugen Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural Fiance, 1870-1914
173. See Malcolm Crook, “ ‘Aux urnes, citoyens!’ Urban and rural electoral behavior during the
French Revolution,” in Alan Forrest and Peter Jones, ReshapingFrance: Town, Country and Region
during the French Revolution (Manchester Manchester University Press, 1991), 152-67; Melvin
Edelstein, “La place de la Révolution française dans lapolitisation des paysans," Annales Historiques
de la Révolution Française, no. 280 (1990): 113-49, and "Electoral Behavior During the Constitu
tional Monarchy (1790-1791): A Community Interpretation," in Renée Waldinger, Philip Dawson,
and Isser Woloch, eds., The French Revolution and the Meaning of Citizenship (Westport, Coon.:
Greenwood, 1994), 105-22; Olivier Audevart, "Les élections en Haute-Vienne pendant la Révolu
tion,” in Jean Boutier, Michel Cassan, Paul D. Hollander, and Bernard Rommaret, eds., Limousin
en Révolution (lYeignac: Editions “Les Monédières," 1989), 129-38.
174. Jean Boutier and Philippe Boutry, “La diffusion des sociétés pofitiques en France (1789-an
ID). Une enquête nationale," Annales Historiques de la Révolution Française, no. 266 (1986): 392.
175. Consider, for example, Lianna Vard/s account oí the legal strategies pursued by vilagers
who very accurately discerned effective ways to bring petitions against their lords to the Royal
illiteracy, and rem oten ess,176 the likelihood that m any villagers w ere unac
quainted w ith the main lines o f legislative action on m atters o f vital con cern
to them seem s rem ote. This is not to say that it m ight not suit country
p eople arrested for sedition to p rofess ignorance o f the law to officials
inclined to believe them .
In Table 8 .2 , I show the changing nature o f antiseigneurial actions over
tim e. T he dates are chosen to point up the m om ents o f com m unication o f
new elite positions on the seigneurial regim e. Although the com m unication
o f the view s o f elites w as a virtually continuous p rocess, particularly w ith
the great augm entation in the flow o f new s during the revolutionary period,
there are a num ber o f particular m om ents w e may seize as particularly
intense. T he convocation o f the E states-G eneral w as (m e such m om ent: not
only did French villagers com e togeth er and d iscover their ow n and each
oth er’s view s, but they had reason to think deeply about the view s o f
outsiders w ith w hom they would have to deal; th ese outsiders, m oreover,
m ade many efforts to im press those view s on the countryside, not m erely
in the general form o f pam phlets o f on e sort o r another circulated w idely in
the pre-revolutionary crisis,177 but in the specific form o f m odel cahiers
w hich various groups and individuals circulated in the struggle for the hearts
and m inds o f the country people as the election s and cahiers-draftàng
approached. T h e delegates elected by village com m unities, then, took their
ow n docum ents to the main tow n o f their bailliage and there actively
engaged in (o r perhaps shyly hung back from ) discussions w ith tow n
representatives, leading to the election o f bailliage delegates and the
adoption o f a bailliage cahier. It is hard to see how this p rocess could have
failed to acquaint people in the countryside, and particularly th ose m ost
given to activism , w ith the view s o f the urban upper strata that dom inated
the bailliage assem blies.
B eyond this particular m om ent, w e may signal the m ajor turning points in
the legislative history: the initial declaration o f the abolition o f the feudal
regim e in early August o f 1789; the subsequent detailed elaboration in
M arch 1790; the drastic revision o f the law that abolished outright many
m ore rights and shifted the burden o f p roof definitively from peasants to
Council. “Peasants and the Law. A Village Appeals to the French Royal Council, 1768-1791,” Social
History 13 (1988): 295-313.
176. Jeremy Popkin’s observations on limits to the diffusion of journalistic accounts are very
pertinent {RevolutionaryNews, 78-96).
177. It would be hard to be more direct than lblney's "Letter from the bourgeoisie to the
country people, renters, sharecroppers and vassals of certain lords who cheat the people,"
circulating around Angers in March 1789: “listen we are good brothers, don't protest so much, we
shall share, don’t we have the same interests? Don’t you have properties like us? \fery well, we
shall free them, just like ours” (cited in André Bencfjebbar, “Propriété et contre-révolution dans
l’ouest,” in La Révolution française et le monde rural [Paris: Comité des TVavaux Historiques et
Scientifiques, 1989], 287).
Ih b le 8 .2 . Events with Antiseigneurial A spects over Time (% )
Antiseigneurial
Time Period Events Total Events
June 1788-February 28,1789 12% (132)

March 1-June 30,1789* 25 (370)
July 1-August 11,1789* 31 (1235)
August 12-D ecem ber 31,1789 37 (158)
January 1-M arch 28,1790* 78 (285)
March 29-M ay 31,1790 32 (95)
June 1-June 30,1790* 62 (90)
July 1 , 1790-M ay 31,1791 49 (403)
June 1-June 30,1791* 69 (89)
July 1 , 1791-January 31,1792 34 (321)
February 1-Aprfl 3 0 ,1792- 47 (605)
May 1-August 25,1792 31 (202)
August 26-O ctober 31,1792* 36 (248)
November 1-31,1792* 9 (104)
Decem ber 1 , 1792-February 28,1793 14 (118)
March 1-M arch 31,1793* 3 (158)
April 1-June 30,1793 12 (77)
‘Insurrectionary peaks (from Ikble 6.3).
lords for the rem aining indem nifiable rights in August 1792; and finally the
ultim ate, final abolition o f July 1793. Table 8 .2 uses th ese dates as m arkers.
In addition, I distinguish peak insurrectionary tim es from m ore quiet tim es.
The ebb and flow o f antiseigneurial even ts, reported in Chapter 6, is
considerably clarified by this table. W e see that during the initial period o f
m ounting insurrectionary intensity— from June 1788 until the convocation—
the percentage o f th ose insurrections that are directed against the seigneur
ial regim e rem ained relatively sm all. France’s country people w ere d iscover
ing that the costs o f insurrection w ere declining sharply and the potential
rew ards w ere rising, but only a little m ore than one rebellious act in eight
had anything to do with the seigneurial regim e until the electoral period with
its trem endous intensification o f contact with the w ell-to-do. A s pam phle
teers floated m odel cahiers, as village activists sought out inform ation on
what w as happening in the tow ns, as urban and sem i-urban advice-givers
som etim es helped out in the crafting o f the parish docum ents, the French
countryside becam e m ore aware and m ore accurately aware o f the exten t o f
antiseigneurial sentim ent within the elites. Rural delegates by the hundreds
at one bailliage m eeting after another could not have helped discoverin g the
elaborate antiseigneurial program s o f the dom inant urban strata o f the
Third E state, w hich, w hile perhaps disappointing in their em phasis on
indem nification, w ere surely very prom ising in the d egree to w hich the
su bject w as not only broached, but broached in detail— often in m uch greater
detail, indeed, than in the country docum ents them selves. Furtherm ore,
the rhetorical tem perature o f th ese urban texts w as often very elevated, in
their depiction o f the barbarous past and the generally abusive nature o f the
system . T h e country delegates w ere not only certain to d iscover all this as
they sat at th ese m eetings. T h ey w ere also fairly likely to d iscover as w ell a
good deal about the position o f the local nobility; there w as often m uch
contact betw een the tw o orders and occasional (and som etim es su ccessfu l)
attem pts to adopt a join t docum ent And in the w eeks b efore the balliage
m eetings noble propagandists, like th ose o f the Third E state, had had
pam phlets and m odel cahiers distributed. Peasant delegates to the tow n
m ight w ell have noted that for all the conservative thrust o f the noble cahiers
the nobility w ere not prepared to m ount a full-blow n defen se o f seigneurial
rights in m any, many bailliages but w ere choosing silen ce as the cou rse o f
prudence. And the villagers w ere no doubt discoverin g as w ell in many
bailliages that sym pathetic parish priests w ere trium phing ov er the bishops
and canons o f the big tow ns in the clerical election s and w ere trium phing
also ov er the delegates o f the m onasteries that often w ere the m ost
im portant ecclesiastical lord s.178
It hardly seem s surprising, then, that the proportion o f insurrections
targeting the seigneurial regim e now doubled in the spring. T h e country
p eople w ere discovering that if they pushed hard there w ould be at least
som e support from significant portions o f the Third E state and an im portant
portion o f the clergy and they w ere probably aware o f the divided and
in effective capacity o f the nobility to defend them selves. A s spring gave way
to sum m er, the first and greatest peak o f peasant actions exploded. In spite
o f how many different sorts o f targets w ere attacked and in spite o f the
fierce concentration o f peasant energies in panics during the peak o f
July-early August, the antiseigneurial character o f the peasant m ovem ents
rose further still. The percentage o f antiseigneurial actions in the sum m er
o f 1789 w as tw o and one-half tim es what it w as before the election s.
A s the new s o f the National A ssem bly’s dram atic actions o f early August
spread, m any rural com m unities gained still further eviden ce that revolution
ary legislators w ere w illing to m ove on seigneurial rights. T o the exten t that
accurate inform ation on the actions o f the nobility and upper clergy diffused
in France, the sen se that the m ore conservative forces w ere hardly prepared
fo r a üfe-and-death struggle to maintain them selves could only be but
tressed . T h e observation that C ondorcet is said to have m ade o f August 4
to the e ffe ct that the nobility o f France w as com m itting suicide179 m ust have
178. Itao-thirds of clerical deputies were parish priests (Lemay, “Les révélations d’un diction
naire,” 171).
179. Condorcet, Mémoires, 2:60.
occu rred to som e peasants. Certainly a good deal o f inform ation about the
August 4 -1 1 actions w as sent out very quickly.180 But, m ore broadly, the
countryside w as learning w here and how it could expend its en ergies and
w hich risks w ere w orth running. D eputies w hose im age o f them selves as
com m anding instant obedience to their laws m ust have been disappointed,
but the laws displayed points o f vulnerability. Revolutionary legislation
revealed, su ggested, and created opportunities for action not necessarily in
accord w ith the legislators’ w ishes. H ere is Bailly: “ T he National A ssem bly’s
d ecree rem oving the right to a m onopoly in hunting w as poorly understood
by the m ultitude w ho, perhaps, did not want to understand i t " 181 H e
pictures the rural population as going far beyond the A ssem bly’s intentions
like a tem porary flood at “ the opening o f a dike holding back the w aters.”
But if the people o f the countryside are no longer held in by the old
constraints im posed from above and (tem porarily) have refu sed to accept
the new on es o f the A ssem bly, they clearly have their ow n self-im posed
discipline; Bailly n otes that the great w ave o f peasant hunting is staying
clear o f the lands o f the “ patriot princes” like the duke o f O rléans (2 :2 4 4 ).
Unlike the liberal Bailly w ho saw the country people as actively reading
the A ssem bly’s acts for their ow n purposes, the reactionary count de
M ontlosier saw them alm ost as unthinking autom ata that react to the
stupidities o f the elite. E lite action for the conservation o f “ this collection o f
ancient debris” — such is his characterization o f the O ld Regim e— had to be
done quietly, if it w ere to be done at all: “ W hen you are in Alpine passes
subject to avalanches, it’s good advice to avoid any n oise.” 182 H e g oes on to
characterize the w ork o f the National A ssem bly in August 1789 as first
encouraging crim es, then “ hurrying to regularize th ese crim es by registerin g
them as laws” (1 :2 3 5 ). In their differing w ays, then, som e o f the legislators
saw that they them selves had an im pact on the countryside. If the new
A ssem bly raised the rew ards for insurrection, how ever, w e n eed to con sider
oth er peasant options that also opened up. Against the risks o f collective
action on e m ust consider the option o f unannounced nonpaym ent Particu
larly for th ose w ho stressed the fam ous phrase about the com plete destruc
tion o f the feudal regim e, nonpaym ent m ay have already seem ed to have
acquired the color o f law. And claim ing that the National A ssem bly could be
taken at its w ord— o r rather, at what villagers w ould like the com plete
destruction o f feudalism to m ean, quite a different m atter than what M erlin
de D ouai w anted it to m ean— was a good w ay to begin to m ake the reality
one w anted. Claiming to believe that the National A ssem bly had abolished
feudalism w as a w ay o f making the National A ssem bly m ean what the
180. Kessel. La nuit du4 août, 175-79, 229-36.

181. BaiDy, Mémoires, 2:244.
182. Montlosier, Mémoires, 1:160.
peasants w ould have liked their w ords to m ean. And fo r m any oth ers in the
countryside, determ ining w hether it w as indeed the reality, w ould have
been w ell w orth testin g— and a lot less likely to get you rself hanged than
storm ing the local château. Certainly this is m ore than ju st peasant ignorance
o f legal n iceties: som e o f the legislators them selves, in fact, had im m ediately
com m unicated such an interpretation o f even ts to their con stitu en ts.183
O ther country peop le, how ever, m ay w ell have judged that circum stances
w ere such that undem onstrative nonpaym ent w as a m uch-preferred alterna
tive under the current w eaknesses o f repressive forces, the adm inistrative
confusions, and the capacity to claim to have believed that the legislation
had abolished feudalism . (Playing the sim ple-m inded peasant, as often ,
offered its rew a rd s.)184
For the next three years, w e have an alternation am ong three different
patterns. T h ere w ere periods o f several m onths o f relative peace— relative
to the peaks, that is, but surely m uch m ore contentious than b efore
1789— during w hich betw een one-third and one-half o f insurrections had an
antiseigneurial elem en t T h ere w ere also stretch es o f on e o r several m onths
during w hich rural con flict rose steeply (see Chapter 6 ); during these peak
ep isod es the antiseigneurial elem ent w as sharply em phasized. In early 1790,
som e 78% o f insurrections w ere antiseigneurial (and if w e restrict the field
to the peak m onth o f January, 87% ); in the lesser peaks o f June 1790 and
June 1791, antiseigneurial even ts still m ade up an im pressive tw o-thirds.
T he low est antiseigneurial propensity in any o f the peak tim es during the
three years follow ing the legislative breakthrough o f August 1789 is the
Mm ere” half o f all even ts during the great w ave o f February-A pril 1792.
E ven in this w ave, on the peak day o f February 5, w e see that 91% o f
even ts w ere antiseigneuriaL Finally w e have the insurrectionary peaks that
follow the subsidence o f antiseigneurial action after the sum m er o f 1792.
Since the eruptions o f N ovem ber 1792 and M arch 1793 w ere focu sed on
quite different targets (subsistence and counterrevolution), in th ese tw o
w aves antiseigneurial even ts m ade the least contribution to peasant rebellion
since the autumn o f 1788.
T he dram atic falloff in antiseigneurial action from the fall o f 1792 on, I
183. On August 8 one deputy wrote home to Alsace that “with a solemn decree, we have
suppressed the whole feudal regime and all the resulting obligations” (Kessel, La nuit du 4 août,
179); on August 12, Arthur Young heard people in Clermont joyously discussing “the great news
just arrived from Paris, oí the utter abolition of tithes, feudal rights, game, warrens, pigeons, etc"
(Travels mFrance, 190).
184. Kessel quotes a mayor in the département of Oise on public readings—in church after
mass—of the laws: “in general they understand nothing and when the law fit their interests, their
imagination went well beyond the law, because they did not understand it” Kessel, La nuit du 4
août, 232). But is this the failure of the peasants to understand. . . or their success in putting one
over on the mayor?
su ggest, w as the sim ple result o f the outright abolition o f m any rights and
the near im possibility, after the legislation o f late August, o f a lord 's
collectin g what, in principle, rem ained. It is probable that few lords could
have actually produced the docum entation now required o f them to defend
many o f their rights, all o f which w ere presum ed illegitim ate. But even if
they had such papers, erne w ould hardly need the level o f caution o f the
m arquis de F errières to realize the risks one ran in attem pting to u se the
Revolution’s cou rts to obtain from French peasants the sorts o f claim s from
which French arm ies w ere now liberating F rance's neighbors. In the w ake
o f the August 1792 legislation, then, the tem ptation o f sim ply not paying
w ould seem to have been very great indeed. Perhaps this is w hy even the
Septem ber 1792 peak, atypically, is no m ore than 36% antiseigneurial (se e
Table 6 .3 ). And surely it is the reason w hy beyond this spurt, certainly from
N ovem ber on, antiseigneurial actions have fallen w ay back, dow n as low as
they w ere b efore the spring o f 1789. The law o f July 1793, finally declaring
that nothing need be paid, appears as som ething o f an anticlim ax.
But France’s rural citizens had a w ider rep ertoire o f resp on ses to the
legislative clim ate than sim ply the decision on w hether or not to challenge
the lords openly: how th ose lords w ere to be challenged also underw ent
m utations and th ese m utations, in part, also seem respon ses to the term s
set by revolutionary legislatures, h i the sum m er and fall o f 1788 and into
the w inter o f 1789 (se e colum n 1 o f Table 8 .3 ) antiseigneurial actions w ere
largely focu sed on a few very specific elem ents o f the seigneurial regim e:
they con cern ed rights in land (and in w ooded land in particular) and the
lord’s “ recreational” privileges: the rights to raise potentially destructive
creatures and the m onopoly on hunting. Such actions m ay w ell have
im proved the living conditions, at least for the m om ent, o f th ose w ho risked
the severe con sequ en ces o f getting caught, but they hardly challenged the
claim s o f the lords in any central w ay. R esistance to th ese claim s o f the
lord, indeed, had long coexisted w ith the seigneurial regim e and m ay be
spoken o f as highly institutionalized. Poaching had an extensive history, but,
w hile altering a bit the im balance in nutrients available to lords and peasants,
it w as m ore an adaptation than a challenge: poaching depends (Hi som eone
else’s stocking gam e p reserves. B y the eighteenth century con flicts over
land u se, and over forests in particular, w ere now often pursued in the legal
arena as lords and peasant com m unities sued one another. T he seigneurial
system , in effect, had absorbed the notion that specific allocations o f land
rights m ight be con tested ; after all, lords eager to take advantage o f
skyrocketing w ood p rices w ere no m ore eager than peasant com m unities to
accept the claim s o f im m em orial tradition. In the eighteenth century, then,
som e peasants poached and som e lords usurped; and both peasants and
lords sued each other. T he boundary betw een the rights o f peasant com m u
nities and lords w as not fixed. It is striking that the first form s o f contestation
in the revolutionary crisis w ere not head-on challenges to the seigneurial

regim e but rather an intensification o f form s o f con flict that had becom e part
and parcel o f it. O f cou rse, even a peripheral attack m ight be pursued with
great intensity o r bitterly resisted . That even this early w e find som e
violen ce against person s should rem ind us that even such lim ited actions
involved risks. (T h e relevant seigneurial em ployee w ho tended to be
attacked at this stage seem s to have been a guard o f som e sort— very likely
a gam e w arden.)
A s the great electoral p rocess unfolded in M arch and beyond, the
antiseigneurial m ovem ent not only grew in size but began an evolution. T he
con flicts over recreational privileges continued, but now a significant num ber
o f grain seizu res and oth er subsistence-oriented actions occu rred. Lay and
ecclesiastical lords w ere being “ visited " by country people seeking fo o d A s
w e com e to understand b etter the history o f French food riots, it is
becom ing d ea r that the coupling o f a seigneurial target and an action aim ed
at food resou rces w as a relatively late developm ent Cynthia B outon’s
research (se e Chapter 5, p. 246) indicates that such actions w ere pioneered
in the cou rse o f the Flour War o f 1775. If one m ight see the Flour W ar as a
harbinger o f the rural struggles o f the Revolution in the sen se that out o f
the m ajor form o f illegal, oppositional, m obilizational collective action— the
struggle ov er subsistence— a new form o f antiseigneurial action w as nur
tured; if subsistence struggles in their traditional, “ cla ssic" form s o f m arket
invasion and transport blockage w ere the dom inant m ode o f action in the
opening w edge o f rural m obilization from the sum m er o f 1788 into the w inter
o f 1789 (se e Fig. 6 .3 ), then perhaps w e m ay see in th ese even ts o f the
spring the bridge betw een the relatively fam iliar w orld o f popular m obilization
and the new , revolutionary antiseigneurialism that cam e to the fore in the
R evolution. Subsistence even ts them selves w ere falling o ff by spring, but
they had opened the w ay.
In the spring w e also see the very beginnings o f a m ore generalized
attack: on the lord’s legal titles, on the sym bols o f seigneuriaHsm, on the
religious link o f lord and G od; and, as part and parcel o f the beginnings o f a
head-on assault, the very place in which the lord dw ells w as now subject to
the pow er o f the rural com m unity. All o f th ese form s o f contestation, tried
out, as it w ere, in the spring, w ould grow in the m onths to com e. N ow legal
docum ents began to be at issu e: som etim es it w as the lord’s ow n docum ents
that w ere dem anded and often destroyed; in other instances the lord w as
forced to publicly renounce his claim s, a renunciation generally taken dow n
chi paper. Such actions m ounted a fundam ental challenge to the lord’s
capacity to collect any o f his rights. T h ey did so indirectly: they altered the
relative capacities o f lord and com m unity to induce state action on their
behalf by rem oving from the lord (o r giving to the com m unity) the sorts o f
docum ents required by the cou rts. L et us note that the pow er o f these
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actions derived from their recognition o f a state that had achieved the
capacity to act as arbiter. We may recall from Chapter 3 (pp. 100 e t se q ., p.
141) that the cahiers o f the rural parishes treated taxation as if the state’s
existen ce w as an accepted fact, and th erefore, what w as at issue w as the
reform o f that state.
A ttem pting to seize the lord’s papers o r scaring a renunciation out o f him
w ere considerably m ore invasive o f the lord’s dw elling and person than
lootin g his rabbit-w arren o r d ovecote, driving on e's animals on to his fields,
or cutting dow n his trees. N o doubt the lord o r his fam ily or his servants
w ere m ore likely to resist; no doubt, too, a peasant gathering prepared to
drag the lord out onto the lawn for a public renunciation w as also m ore
prepared, itself, for violen ce than a group seizing w ood in the forests. It is
w orthw hile noting, then, that the increase in violen ce against persons is n ot
up far m ore than it is in the spring; indeed, looking across the table, on e can
see no point at which violen ce against persons occu rs in m ore than a fairly
small proportion o f such even ts. (T his is by no m eans to deny the terrifying
im pact on victim s and th ose w ho feared to be victim s, the utter disgust o f
the right w ith the failure o f the governm ent to effectively prevent such
h orrors185 and the general silence o f the le ft.)186
A s observed in Chapter 5 (see p. 228), the m obilized peasant group
seem ed to be aim ing at elim inating a social role far m ore than a person. O f
cou rse th ere w as m ore seriou s dam age to the châteaux now that the group
w as penetrating it, rather than confining its assault to the w oods and fields.
In itself, this d oes not m ake invading crow ds m urderous. W hy bother to kill
the lord if what m akes him a lord is the p ieces o f paper w ith the legal
form ulas— which can be burned? T he m arquis de F errières, for on e, had an
answ er: durable patterns o f deferen ce, anchored, not in particular claim s or
p ieces o f paper, but in “ opinion.” 187 If seigneurial dom ination w as n ot a m ere
185. See, for example, Mondmier, Mémoires, 1:222-39.

186. Even on the left, it is hard to find expressions of empathy when rural violence was
concerned, in stark contrast to such supporting statements as Bamave’s’ famous mocking response
to those who had expressed horror at an urban lynching: “Was this blood, then, so pure?" Perhaps
rural popular violence was profoundly frightening to al who were wel off in a property-dominated
society (an observation of Cohn Lucas).
187. See Ferrières, Correspondance, 207. The lawyer GreBet de Beauregard, Third Estate
deputy of Guéret, consoled a noble friend by letter on July 20. 1790: “just as among those with no
privilege, people distinguish the man of good family background from one without this advantage,
opinion will return to the Nobility a part of the prerogatives that have been taken from it When the
circumstances that have led to the suppression erf the orders no longer obtain, we shall be less
pained to see distinctions that appeared odious.. . . Some great lords, instead of rubbing out their
coats-of-arms, have covered them with plaster, convinced themselves that we shall see them
without animosity when the plaster, fallen in decay, lets them reappear. But someone (whose name
I’ve forgotten) replaced the coat-of-arms with a hot air balloon . . . from which ballast is being
thrown and on which one reads this device: ‘The more they take from me, the higher I rise’ "
(Grellet de Beauregard, “Lettres,” 90).
em anation o f w ords on paper, but inhered in the lord’s person , on e m ight

exp ect eith er the prediction o f the optim istic m arquis, to the e ffe ct that
deferen ce w ould outlast upheaval, or, alternately, a m ore exterm inatory
approach on the part o f com m unities seeking their em ancipation. But w ell
b efore the m arquis w as trying to ch eer his w ife w ith the thought that a m ere
legislature could not reshape “ opinion,” rural com m unities w ere developing
oth er w ays o f challenging the structures o f deferen ce that w ere built into
the system . T h e m ost striking is the very penetration o f the château itself,
taking place in about on e event in five in the spring o f 1789, but already on
its w ay to becom ing the central act o f defiance. O nce inside on e could
dem and not only food but to be fed, then and there. Just as the derelict
state m ight be held to its responsibilities to its people in m any o f the state-
oriented subsistence even ts, so m ight the tord be held to a vision o f the
patrim onial provider and h o s t In m ocking the sym bolic pretension o f
lordship, how ever, the existen ce o f lordship w as still acknow ledged,
w hereas an as y et small num ber o f challenges w ent further and began to
attack the sym bolizations o f the very idea o f lordship: the coats-of-arm s, the
w eathervanes, the (often m erely decorative) turrets, the w eapons, the
church benches— all the m aterial objects that represen ted what distin
guished a lord from his neighbors.
T he p recise m ix o f th ese targets shifted over tim e. A t th ose m om ents
when attacks on seigneurial institutions increased radically in num bers,
larger proportions o f those larger num bers saw the châteaux en tered: in
67% o f all antiseigneurial incidents in July-early August 1789; 45% in January
1790; 55% in June 1790; 56% in June 1791; 77% in February-A pril 1791; a
rem arkable 81% in A ugust-Septem ber 1792; and 56% in N ovem ber 1792% .
T h ese m ay b e com pared w ith an overall rate o f 27% for our entire data
series. W ith increasing propensities to en ter the lord’s dw elling also cam e,
unsurprisingly, increasing reports o f serious dam age: the insurrectionary
w aves o f 1792, both February-A pril and A ugust-Septem ber w ere especially
prone to generate such rep orts.
For all their energy and violen ce, how ever, the peasant m obilizations
w ere by no m eans unreflective actions driven by vengeful passion: they
responded to the w ays in which the revolutionary legislatures continued to
redefine the fate o f the seigneurial regim e. T he issue o f burden o f p roof in
disputed cases w as first raised by the National A ssem bly in its law o f M arch
1790 that placed that burden on peasant com m unities. It th erefore becam e
far m ore im portant for peasant com m unities to have som e docum entary
basis on which to bring cases before a court. Frightening a lord into dictating
such a docum ent w as an instant reaction: the spring o f 1790 saw nearly on e-
third o f all even ts involve a coerced renunciation; in the spurt o f antiseigneur-
ial even ts in June o f that year, that proportion rose to as many as half o f all
even ts. T he National A ssem bly’s action increased the incentive for peasants,
not only to attack the seigneurial regim e, but to intim idate the lord into
producing a statem en t B y setting the rates for indem nification as high
as they w ere set in M ay 1790, the National A ssem bly probably increased
the incentives for many com m unities to run the risks o f violen ce in obtain
ing the needed docum ents. H ence the law o f M ay w as follow ed by the par
ticular form o f law lessness o f June. T he law less countryside w as by now
highly m otivated to seek by violent m eans the docum ents required by
the law.
C oerced renunciations fell o ff sharply in the sum m er o f 1790 and stayed
low , apart from a flare-up in the fall o f 1792; perhaps th ose to whom such a
docum ent w ould appear useful had already obtained it by the sum m er o f
1790. T he corresponding exploration o f seizure and destruction o f seigneur
ial archives is m ore difficult to assess because som e o f the archive destru c
tion is plainly subsum ed under destruction o f the châteaux as a w hole. If a
fire in the lord’s archives led to the w hole building being destroyed, it could
easily be the case that the only known fact about that particular incident
w ould be its overall destructiveness. T he blurring o f detail in our sou rces is,
in this m atter, com pounded by the likelihood that som e peasant gatherings
opted to d estroy the record s flam boyantly by torching the w hole building.
W hile all our subcategories o f antiseigneurial action are undoubtedly under
reported, archive destruction, then, has the added elem ent o f being som e
tim es concealed under a different label.
But the lord’s docum ents m ight be a target o f peasant action for tw o quite
different reason s. T he com m unity m ay w ish to d estroy the lord’s capacity
to m ount a legal case; alternatively, the com m unity m ay hope to find
eviden ce useful for its ow n ca se .188 The first is m ore likely by far, I w ould
su ggest, to eventuate in a burning château, w hile the secon d is rather sim ilar
to coerced renunciation. N ow m y contention here is that the M arch 1790
laws raised the value to the com m unity o f obtaining docum ents, but did
nothing in particular to encourage destroying the lords’. Thus not only w ere
coerced renunciations running high in the June outburst but so w ere title
seizures— w ithout any increase in serious château dam age. L et us now jum p
ahead to the opportune w inter o f 1792, as m em bers o f the French legisla
ture w ere beginning to con n ect their ow n talk about France’s m ission to lib
erate E urope from feudalism with the villages o f their ow n country, as the
probability o f an unprecedented m ilitary m obilization grew day by day. T he
m ost striking feature that Table 8 .3 show s us is the focu s on the château
itself: m ore than three-fourths o f peasant even ts m ake the château a target;
188. This is a point overlooked in Philippe-Jean Hesse’s path-breaking article on the modalities of
antiseigneurial revolts. See “Géographie coutumière et révoltes paysannes en 1789; Une hypothèse
de travail," Annales Historiques de la Révolution Française 51 (1979): 280-306. See also Albert
Sobou! "Le brûlement des titres féodaux (1789-1793),” mhis Problèmes paysans de la Révolution,
1789-1848 (Paris; Maspero, 1983), 135-46.
m ore than tw o-fifths, by m y crude reckoning, d o seriou s dam age th ere.

T h ese figures exceed th ose for any previous point, including the previous
high in th ese particulars, the sum m er o f 1789. W hile a substantial proportion
o f th ese incidents involve land or titles, the sym bolic aspects o f seigneurial-
ism o r its religious connection, the m ovem ent o f w inter 1792 is not unique
for any o f th ese, but for its focu s on the spatial cen ter o f the seigneurial
regim e, the lord 's headquarters and hom e. From this point on, indeed, the
antiseigneurial m ovem ent maintains these traits: the seriou sly dam aging
attack on the château rem ains its m ost distinctive feature. W e are far from
the focu s (Hi the peripheral outposts o f seigneuriahsm o f but a short
tim e b efore.
C onsider now the tail end o f the antiseigneurial m ovem ent: even ts taking
place after the legislation o f August 1792 had shifted the burden o f p roof
on to the lords. W e find that renunciations w ere on a downward trajectory,
vanishing by the end o f N ovem ber. B y w ay o f contrast, incidents described
as including seriou s destruction w ere quite high, only exceed ed during the
insurrectionary peaks earlier in 1792. Indeed, it w as the highest rate o f
seriou s dam age to châteaux oth er than during m ajor peaks o f antiseigneurial
activity. W hat is so striking about this stretch o f tim e from D ecem ber 1792
into June 1793 is that even w ithout any strikingly high points o f attacks on
the lords (n o doubt, m any peasant com m unities w ere ju st avoiding com ply
ing) w hen there w ere such attacks they tended to be quite destructive
o f property. T h ere w ere tw o distinctive elem ents that characterize the
antiseigneurial even ts that follow the legislation o f August: first, the pattem
o f continued intensive activity into Septem ber and then a radical falloff in the
num bers o f incidents; and secon d, the continuation o f the high proportion o f
attacks on the château am ong the few rem aining antiseigneurial even ts. IW o
rather different w ays o f explaining this configuration suggest them selves. In
the first o f th ese, w e m ight conjecture that th ose still fighting seigneurial
rights in 1792 w ere the m ost bitterly opposed in the country. Thus, as
oth er villagers w ho accepted the earlier legislation fell away from risky
m obilization, those left w ere angrier and w ere unwilling to give up opportuni
ties to bum the château, even beyond August, w hen the regim e w as
essentially dism antled. A secon d hypothesis, how ever, w ould dow nplay
burning anger and look to the changing configuration o f in terest and opportu
nity. T h e law o f August 25 set up a structure in which the only reason to
take collective action, now , w ould be to deny the lords the use o f relevant
docum ents should they ch oose a cou rt co n te st L et m e n ote that the
C onvention itself seem ed to acknow ledge a w ave o f attacks on archives at
this point by ordering public officials to take this task out o f the hands o f the
people and organize, instead, public burnings.189
189. Article 6 oí the Law of July 17, 1793: “Former lords . . . and other holders of titles that
Perhaps both p rocesses w ere at w ork. T h e legislation o f August 1792

encouraged destruction o f the lord 's archives within the very ten se clim ate
o f w ar and m ounting counterrevolutionary activity.*190 Am id a general rise in
the level o f violen ce, a point to which I shall return in a m om ent, th ose w ho
now w ent after the lord’s archives did not bother to lim it the property
dam age. In the spring o f 1790, the laws had encouraged seizure as w ell as
destruction o f seigneurial docum ents: som e peasant com m unities m ight w efl
have w ished to use the lord’s docum ents to m ake their case in co u rt But
w ith the burden o f p roof now shifted to the lords by the new law o f
1792, there w as n o reason to seize archives and m uch reason to dem olish
them .
If this is c o r r e c t it is rem arkable how low the rate o f violen ce against
persons rem ained. B y w ay o f con tra st consider the cou rse o f religiously
oriented incidents, which w e already know from Chapter 5 to have m ore
than their share o f personal assault (se e p. 232). N ow look at Figure 8 .5 .
A s anti-tithe action declined w ith victory and as the Civil C onstitution o f the
C lergy generated a frequent m ism atch o f clerical and com m unal political
leanings, violen ce against clerics rose sharply. B y late 1790 the likelihood o f
personal injury in clashes ov er religious issu es w as far above what typified
clashes over seigneurial rights. This w as so even after the violen ce o f
antiseigneurial actions rose in 1792. To reiterate the point m ade in Chapter
5: the p eople o f the countryside d o not personalize the seigneurial regim e.
L ords m ay be hurt, but generally in ord er to force a w ritten docum ent
from them . In spite o f a clim ate o f m ounting tension, w ar, and rhetorical
dem onization by revolutionary elites, the personal attacks stay low . A nother
striking sign: there is no point at which the agents o f the lord, often held to
be lightning rod s fo r popular anger, are very frequent targets. T he largest
such percen tage, 10% in the M arch 29-M ay 31, 1790, stretch , seem s to
involve assaults on notaries in attem pts to get them to w rite dow n a lord’s
renunciation or to seize the lord 's papers stored in his office.
Peasants, Legislators, and the Boundary

of State Action
Peasant actions often seem ed to flow into the space vacated by the state.
T he governm ent’s failure to assure food within proper p rices, to constrain
create or recognize rights suppressed by the present decree. . . ahal be obliged to deposit them
within three months of the publication of the present decree, at the municipal registers. Those
deposited before August 10 shall be burned on that day in the presence of the communal coundl
and the citizens; the remainder wS be burned at the end of three months” (A/* 69:98-99).
190. August-September 1792 had many such counterrevolutionary events, alongside the intisri-
gneurial ones; see Figure 6.4.
Fig. 8 .5 Religious Events: V iolence Against Persons
lords to honor com m unal claim s to gather what they could cm the forest
floor, or to com pel th ose w ith the right to hunt to abide by the custom ary
restriction s provoked an array o f actions readily seen w hen the state’s
coerciv e forces faltered (see Chapter 5, p. 263). Peasants set p rices,
reoccu pied the forests, and cleared their surroundings o f predators. But
they also overflow ed the traditional channels. L ords w ere not m erely
com pelled to honor traditions (perhaps m ockingly as in the coerced m eal).
T he very cen ters o f seigneurialism w ere challenged: the com m unity an
nounced itself as the sou rce o f ju stice in its erection or rem oval o f gallow s;
it seized the w ords on w hich the lord’s claim rested ; it d estroyed the
benches that m ade the lord m ore than ju st a fellow parishioner and tore
dow n the w eathervane, turrets, and coats-of-arm s that m ade the château
som ething m ore than a large house. All th ese actions w ere eventually
reappropriated by the state: the state declared the end o f coats-of-arm s and
w eathervanes; it perm itted hunting; it authorized nonpaym ent; and it or
dered the burning o f seigneurial titles. In the tim ing o f its ow n actions, the
state follow ed the w aves o f peasant m obilization. And w hatever the ration
ale the law yers claim ed to underlie the distinctions am ong rights— th ose to
be abolished outright and th ose to be indem nified— the particular rights in
th ose categories in M arch 1790 corresponded, at least roughly, to distinc
tions found in the parish cahiers. T he people o f the countryside did a great
deal m ore than m ove into a space left em pty by state collapse. T h ey also
carved into that space the channels that structured the w ays in w hich the
state, in its turn, w ould m ove back in. And state reappropriation, in its tum ,
w as not m ere restoration. In reversing their free-m arket propen sities, the
revolutionary elites did not restore the Old Regim e econom ic con trols, but
instituted the m ost thoroughgoing regulation o f prices in French history.
And in exem plary violen ce against persons, the new state, w ith its tens o f
thousands o f headless corp ses and hundreds o f thousands incarcerated, w as
m ultiplying a hundredfold the plebeian violen ce being displaced.
A Peasant-Bourgeois Alliance
B y the spring o f 1789, a program o f liberal reform had em erged. T h e cahiers
show how deeply this program had penetrated the French elites, although
there w ere im portant differen ces, on the w hole, betw een Third E state and
nobility, as w ell as im portant variation within each estate from on e cahier to
the n e x t T h e great crisis o f the late 1780s w as seen by som e as m ore than
a problem , but also as an opportunity for the enactm ent o f the program (s).
T h e m isfortunes that broke the habits o f obedien ce, destroyed the sen se
that tom orrow w ould be very m uch like today, provided, at the sam e tim e,
an opportunity, an opening. T he financial crisis w as a cause for both despair
and hope. A s the T liird E state o f Draguignan put it in their cahier: “ T h e
m ost disastrous period o f the m onarchy is becom ing the m ost m em orable
and days o f peace and happiness are going to follow this tim e o f disorder”
CAP 3 :2 5 4 ).
W ithin the various legislatures, how ever, there w as a range o f view s from
opponents o f reform to proponents o f very radical m easures indeed. T he
rural turbulence provided an opportunity for the enactm ent o f m easures
m ore radical than m ight otherw ise have seen the light o f day. Peasant
uprisings kept rural France on the legislative agenda and drow ned out the
tendencies to silence on seigneurial rights that characterized m uch o f the
nobility. T h e evident needs o f the state for resou rces and o f individual
legislators for personal secu rity for country property and fam ily safety
m ight, in som e circum stances, have suggested a repressive option. But the
strength o f one or another reform program adhered to by m any in the
legislatures m ade this a losing proposition as far as seigneurial rights w ere
concern ed. Peasants running the risks o f insurrection could keep bringing
seigneurial rights to the fore in spring and sum m er 1789, w inter 1 7 8 9 -9 0 ,
spring and again sum m er o f 1792 (and less sharply in June 1790 and June
1791). This peasant pressu re, how ever, considered out o f the con text o f
the m ultipie forces at w ork, did not guarantee a legislative m ovem ent
along favorable lines. But w hen rural upheaval w as secon ded by Parisian
insurrection, the forces in the legislature counseling con cession s to the
peasantry carried the day over the advocates o f holding the Une.
Perhaps the com position o f the National A ssem bly, which governed until
the fall o f 1791, enacted the initial d ecrees and, generally, set the tone for
the legislature-countryside dialogue, contributed significantly both to mutual
m isunderstanding and the potential o f an alliance o f urban legislative radicals
and northern villagers. Tim othy Tackett’s research show s the Third E state
deputies to be overw helm ingly w ell-off, from large cities and northerners
(this last a quirk o f the creation o f num erous electoral divisions in northeast
ern France). O ne would be hard-put to create a greater social distance from
the p oorer country people w ho m ade w ar on the lords, largely southerners
after the crisis o f the sum m er o f 1789 (se e Tables 7 .5 and 7 .6 ). And Tackett
show s as w ell that th ose deputies with agricultural backgrounds, as w ell as
the rural clerical deputies, spoke up very little after that sum m er, perhaps
show ing a sen se o f being out o f place. (In the early internal debates am ong
the clerical deputies, in T ackett’s account, bishops insulted priests by calling
them “ sons o f peasants.” ) Q uite tellingly, the Jacobin grouping, w hose
coa lescen ce' in 1790 Tackett traces, deviates from the general picture
profoundly. It not only included the A ssem bly's few sem iplebeians,191 but
had its cen ter o f gravity in small tow ns and rural areas. A lm ost tw o-fifths o f
the Jacobins cam e from places w ith few er than tw o thousand person s and a
m ajority w ere from the South. Such delegates, one m ay con jectu re, w ould
be far m ore likely to have som e understanding o f the rural resistan ce,
perhaps had som e sym pathy, and probably had the local personal and
political connections to advise them on the sorts o f legislation that peasants
in P rovence or Lim ousin m ight settle fo r .192
T he legislators w ere loath to bid fo r support in the countryside at the co st
o f alienating oth ers in that sam e countryside. Initially they sought com pro
m ise betw een peasants and holders o f seigneurial rights; but after they
began to travel dow n the road o f com m itting them selves to th ose w ho paid,
they w ere reluctant to favor one portion o f the peasantry over another
(although w hen they took sides it would be in a direction consistent
with their ow n leanings to agrarian individualism ). Since seigneurial rights
constituted one area w here som ething could be given to peasants w ithout
191. The deputywhose worldwas dosest to the peasants was probably Pierre-François Lepoutre
of Flanders, whose sons worked in the fields and whose daughters labored as servants. He, Bee the
sprinkling of propertyless lawyers, sat with the left
192. See Timothy Tackett, Becominga Revolutionary, 42,46,130, 231, 286.
em broiling legislators in intracom m unal struggles, this becam e a very attrac

tive option indeed193— and ultim ately an option ch osen in the face o f insurrec
tion even when the ob ject o f insurrection w as not seigneurial rights. W hen
counterrevolution exacerbated the strains o f wartim e m obilization, the
C onvention responded to counterrevolutionary peasants w ith force— with
force o f such an extent, ultim ately, that som e today have taken up the
language o f gen ocid e.194 But not with force alone. W e have already looked
at B arère’s opening a discussion o f a broad range o f benefits to rich er and
p oorer peasants as w ell as force in m id-M arch (se e p. 450). But even the
absence o f a significant antiseigneurial m ovem ent did not prevent the new ly
radicalized Convention (after the Parisian rising o f late M ay and early June
1793) from advancing w ell beyond the legislation o f the previous August,
securing, as it w ere, the tolerance o f those many country p eople w ho would
n ever seek a return to the dom ination o f the lords— and, w ith luck, achieving
an easier tim e getting their sons to fight their fellow country people in the
W est as w ell as the sons o f oth er country people from G erm any and Austria
and Spain.
Table 8 .4 , perhaps in an overschem atic fashion, sum m arizes som e o f
Ifcb le 8 .4 . M ajor Legislative Tim ing Points, M ajor Peasant and Parisian Insurrections
Character o f
Legislation in Is Antiseigneur-
Date o f Relation to iahsm aM ajor Date o f
M ajor Legislation Existing Law: Date o f M ajor Comptaient in M ajor
on Seigneurial C oncessions or Wave o f Rural Insurrectionary Parisian
Regime Firm ness Insurrection W ave? Insurrection
August 4 -1 1 , C oncessions to Summer 1789 Yes July 1789

1789 countryside
No new No new N o wave o f rural No wave o f rural
legislation legislation insurrection insurrection O ctober 1789
M arch 1 5-28, Firm ness toward No Parisian
1790 countryside W inter 1789-90 Yes insurrection
August 25, C oncessions to Spring 1792 and

1792 countryside Summer 1792 Yes August 1792
C oncessions to M ay 3 1 -
July 17, 1793 countryside Spring 1793 No June 2 ,1 7 9 3
193. Moving more radically against seigneurial rights was made more attractive by meshing with
the Revolution’s steadily deepening antinoble thrust; see Patrice L-R. Higonnet, Class, Ideology
and OuRights ofNobles During theFrench Revolution (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981).
194. Reynald Secher, La génocide franco-français: Vendie-Vengt (Paris: Presses Universitaires
de France, 1986). For a telling critique, see Charles TiDy, “State and Counter-revolution in France,"
in Ferenc Fehér, The French Revolution and Ou Birth of Modernity (Berkeley and Los Angeles:
University of California Press, 1990), 49-68.
th ese relationships for the nugor legislative turning points. T he table em pha
sizes the follow ing points:
• T h e greatest w aves o f rural insurrection w ere all follow ed by m ajor

legislative acts. Seigneurial rights w ere placed on the agenda by insur
rection .
• In the absence o f Parisian insurrection, the direction o f legislation did
not m ake con cession s to peasants. T he act o f M arch 1 5 -2 8 , 1790 (and
the associated decisions on the m odalities and rates o f indem nification
o f early M ay) gave a m arkedly conservative spin to the stirring but
am biguous pronouncem ents o f the previous A u gu st O ne m ight take
the contrasting roles o f one deputy in the enactm ents o f sum m er 1789
and spring 1790 as em blem atic. L e Chapelier presided over the session s
o f August 4 and the subsequent days during which con cern s over
property w ere integrated into the language o f em ancipation, renuncia
tion, and regeneration. In the debates occasion ed by the risings in the
Southeast and Brittany o f February 1790, leading up to the M arch
legislation, L e Chapelier reported for the C om m ittee on the C onstitution
(Mia proposal concerning the proper quantity and m odalities o f pacifica
tory force for protectin g rural property (AP 11:653).
• Parisian insurrection w ithout peasant insurrection did relatively little
insofar as legislation on rural issu es is concern ed. We recall the m arch
to Versailles on the fam ous O ctober days; O ctober 5 -6 , 1789, w as
as dram atic as any urban upheaval in the entire R evolution. Angry
Parisians— w om en on breadlines, militant artisans, and shopkeepers—
m arched out to Versailles and not only m enaced the royal fam ily, but
terrified many legislators as w ell. T h e National Guard under Lafayette
stepped in, assum ing an am biguous m ediating role, and escorted the
king to Paris. (D id the Guard save the king from the people or did it
seize the king on behalf o f the p eop le?) T he legislature now m oved
itself to Paris and both legislature and king w ere m uch m ore dangerously
close to volatile Parisian politics. T h ese vivid even ts m ay have broken
the im passe ov er the king’s stalling on the prom ulgation o f the d ecrees
o f August 4 -1 1 , but they broke no new legislative ground.
• For peasant insurrection to lead to con cession s to the countryside on
seigneurial rights, it w as not n ecessary for the insurrection to have
antiseigneurial them es, only that it be large and w idespread. In 1793
there w ere very few antiseigneurial actions, and the risings o f the
spring w ere dom inated by counterrevolution, yet the new law o f July
1793 w as as definitive an abolition o f the feudal regim e as the R evolution
w as to achieve.
T he risings in the countryside, then, constituted opportunities for liberals

in pow er to m ove against the lords; and for th ose w ho w ere even m ore
liberal than m ost to m ove m uch foster than m ost originally intended. T he
urban notables’ program o f freein g up the m arketplace w as realizable, thanks
to the great opportunity presented by the deficit from 1787 on; and
then, from the sum m er o f 1789 on, by the deficit com bined w ith peasant
insurrection; and still later, by the deficit, peasant insurrection, and inter
state w arfare. Yet the notables’ vision o f the sovereign m arket w as not
equally easy to bring about in the countryside in all o f its aspects. It
w as m ost quickly launched on the antiseigneurial fro n t C ohesive peasant
com m unities rose against their lords. Peasants arm ed them selves and
quickly rem em bered o r red iscovered the arts o f planning, surveillance,
intim idating, and destroyin g the capacities o f the lords to continue. T his w as
not a propitious m om ent for legislative attack on those com m unities as
such. T h e notables’ p roject o f freein g property from com munal as w ell as
seigneurial restriction s, th erefore, w as initially shelved. A s the battle against
the lords began to be w on; as contending political forces offered their
serv ices to particular segm ents o f rural France in their ow n search for
allies, divisions began to appear within th ose very com m unities, and th ese
divisions, now , began to provide an opening for enactm ent o f anticom m unal
m easures as w e ll If the peasant m ovem ent at first seem ed to m ake
antiseigneurialism salient, appeared to put it on the agenda, the sam e could
be said, m ore w eakly, for the relationship o f intracom m unal con flicts and
questions revolving around the support for individualistic or com m unalistic
conception s o f rural social relations on the part o f French elites. Thus, the
peasant m ovem ent, by its united thrust in one arena and by its division in a
secon d, constituted opportunities for determ ined groups am ong the pow er-
holders to a ct.195
I w rite “seemed to m ake antiseigneurialism salient” ; the salience o f
antiseigneurialism involved a double p rocess. F irst o f all, the legislature w as
oriented to seein g things in an antiseigneurial light, so its interpretation o f
rural even ts tapped into a particular reading o f French social relations. O ne
reason Bam ave so early sketched the main lines o f what cam e to be known
as the "M arxist” thesis is that a great deal o f the upper Third E state had
already assigned seigneurial rights a central role in their interpretation o f
French society (se e Chapters 4 and 9 ).
But antiseigneurialism becam e salient in a secon d w ay. Just as the
legislators reacted to peasant action, so, too, did peasants respond to the
pow er-holders. W e have seen that early in the Revolution the antiseigneurial
195. And, let it be noted, that this chapter, including our analysis of Tàble 8.4 in particular, has
shown that the peasant-legislature dialogue was at moments critically affected by circumstances
external to that dialogue: the outbreak of warfare, the rhythms of Parisian insurrection. The
consequences of rural conflict, then, were linked to urban struggles; and since those urban struggles
are not treated here, it is as if an offstage presence suddenly enters center stage. The intertwining
of urban and rural conflict is a theme that would fill another book.
dem en t within the broad insurrectionary current w as a grow ing (m e. It

grew because it seem ed a fruitful direction in w hich to push. T he general
thrust and the divisions am ong the pow er-holders provided opportunities for
rural m ilitants. T h e division, m ost obviously, created the rapid underm ining
o f coerciv e capacities, totally reorienting the possibilities o f bargaining. W hat
w as usually o ff the agenda could now be placed upon it and everything from
surreptitious evasion to collective, overt, and vocal battle w as undertaken.
But undertaken on behalf o f what? Country people differed from one another
in their aim s (as the cahiers show ) and a single com m unity m ight have many
aim s. And the variety o f potential rural targets w as great (se e C hapters
5 -7 ). G iven the w illingness o f the legislatures to give ground on seigneurial
rights, how ever, this quickly cam e to be a particularly fruitful area in w hich
to push.
C onsider rural com m unities in tim e o f revolution debating the prudent
cou rse, perhaps early Sunday afternoon, after M ass. If rural actions early in
the spring o f 1789 involving invasion o f the lord’s fields seem ed to pay off,
should the next step be to push land issues m ore broadly, o r antiseigneurial
ones? If the spring o f 1789 show ed the potential o f raids on the lord’s
food stock s, w as this to be developed along its subsistence dim ension o r its
antiseigneurial one? W hat lesson s w ere peasant com m unities learning from
their ow n insurrectionary struggles? T he election s for the E states-G eneral,
first o f all, and then the enactm ents o f the various legislatures w ere teaching
them that the seigneurial regim e w as the opportune ta rg et B y interpreting
peasant action as antiseigneurial, the law givers taught peasants to fit their
future actions to this m old. Invading the lord’s fields and com pelling the lord
to feed them , paid o ff for angry peasants on the eternally celebrated night
o f August 4 in the total abolition o f the feudal regim e; it did not pay o ff in
prom ises o f land for the land-short o r food for the hungry. On the contrary,
the legislatures initially sought to p rotect property rights and free up the
grain m arket
M arxists fo r a long tim e have spoken o f an alliance o f country p eople and
bou rgeoisie against feudalism , although all elem ents o f this form ulation have
been su bject to challenge.1961 believe the present evidence supports th ese
challenges insofar as it show s that, for all the antiseigneurial elem ents in the
cahiers o f both groups, no Third E state-peasant con vergen ce w as yet very
far advanced in M arch 1789. During that M arch only 28% o f insurrections
had antiseigneurial elem ents (already significantly up from prior m onths).
196. Alfred Cobban doubted the antifeudaMsmof the TUrd Estate deputies but accepted that oí
the peasants. George Taylor doubted the initial significance of peasant antifeudaKsm but accepted
that of the Third Estate. In Chapters 2 and 3 I have debated both of these positions. The core
element of both positions (with which I am in agreement) is that the countryside and the urban
notables dtffer 'mtheir evaluations of the seigneurial regime and in their proposals for change. But I
read the cahiers as identifying two different antiseigneurialisros.
But peasants and legislators found each oth er. Peasant m ilitants, seeking to
exploit the opportunities o f the collapse o f the old ord er learned to m ove
against the lords m ore broadly and single-m indedly until the battle w as w oo;
and legislative factions learned to find in the peasant m ovem ents a potent
resou rce for pushing an antiseigneurial program that increasingly w ent
beyond what the Third E state had put in its cahiers. 197
T h e antiseigneurial alliance w as not sim ply ju st th ere, a by-product o f
structural change im pelling an urban notability and a peasantry on con vergen t
cou rses. T h ere w ere such structural changes, to be sure. T he urban d ite
had forged a program to free up the m arket and curtail privileges. T he
countryside proposed reform ing state taxation in the in terests o f utility and
fairness w hile consigning the hopelessly u seless o r unfair taxes to the
trashcan. W hile m uch o f the seigneurial regim e w as to be abolished as
utterly w orthless, a significant rural m inority held that th ose seigneurial
rights capable o f reform w ere to be reform ed. Thus the bou rgeoisie and the
peasants in M arch 1789. T he antiseigneurial alliance rested , then, on
positions held on both sides, but those positions (on both sid es) changed.
T he insurrectionary peasants o f M arch 1790 did not accep t the relatively
conservative legislated com prom ise that, in m any w ays, fit their program o f
the year b efore; the peasants o f M arch 1790 w ere not the peasants o f
M arch 1789. And the legislators changed as w ell as they dealt w ith one
another, with Parisian m ilitance, and w ith royal im m obilism . T h e antisei
gneurial alliance, then, w as not sim ply there, not sim ply a given, not sim ply
the by-product o f culture o r ideology, and rooted in structural conditions
and conjunctural circum stance. T he alliance w as m ade. It w as m ade as rural
com m unities and legislative factions each learned how to u se the oth er.
W hat unfolded, then, w as a p rocess o f bargaining in w hich the en ergies
expended and risks taken in pursuit o f objectives w ere calibrated to shifting
expectations o f the likely chances o f su ccess and the costs o f failure as
legislators divided in som e w ays (on seigneurial rights) and united on oth ers
(on the defen se o f w ealth) confronted a subject rural population itself with
its ow n points o f unity ((Hi seigneurial rights, for exam ple) and o f division
(on property claim s).
197. We would not expect to find cautious peasants openly defining themselves as following a
strategy of violating the law in order to reform it A petition to the National Assembly from a village
in the Somme Vsdley comes about as dose as one could imagine in a document permeated by
respect for such catchwords as “property” and “equality” when they point out that if they have to
continue to meet their obligations to the local duke they will not have the funds to pay their taxes.
In its preference for taxes over seigneurial dues this village of some three hundred souls is Eke any
other village; in its almost open attempt to get the legislators to accept a trade, it is unusuaL See
Bryant T. RaganJr., "Rural Political Activism and Fiscal Equality in the Revokitionary Somme,” in
Bryant T. RaganJr. and Elizabeth Williams, eds., RecreatingAuthority mRevolutionaryFranc* (New
Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1992), 44.
T h e alliance cam e to exist as radical legislators and militant peasants both

seized the m om ent T h e Revolution w as n o t how ever, a single m om ent
but a prolonged series o f m om ents w hen the actions o f a subject population
and a group o f pow er-holders created new opportunities for each oth er.
C h apter
9
Words and T hings: T he
French Revolutionary
Bourgeoisie Defines the
Feudal Regime
A s it carried on its dialogue w ith the countryside, the legislature continually

recon stru cted a rationale for what it w as doing. T h e conceptual cen ter o f
th ese discussions w as the term “feudal,” used quite com m only at the on set
o f the R evolution to indicate a presum ably delim ited collection o f claim s o f
one party upon another (feudal rights), rather less com m only to indicate,
holistically, a particular form o f social ord er that w as historically sp ecific
(“the feudal regim e” but n ever “a feudal regim e” ) and, increasingly com
m only, and, even m ore abstractly, an organizing principle o f social relations,
w ith no very exact English equivalent (féodalité).
T h e seigneurial rights could hardly be discussed in the three legislatures
that w rote and rew rote the laws w ithout referring to conception s o f the
feudal. In this chapter w e sketch the evolution o f th ese con ception s. In the
last chapter w e saw how legislators undertook actions under pressu re from
the countryside and from the m ilitants o f Paris. L egislators sought rationales
for these actions. Such rationales w ere not to b e con stru cted out o f w hole
cloth, for the deputies did m ore than sim ply react to pressu res: they had
Words and T hings 517
their ow n agenda and program and a set o f justifications for that agenda and
program . T h ese justifications rested on a num ber o f conception s: con cep
tions o f the sanctity o f property and ideas about the m eaning o f the term
"p rop erty” ; ideas o f French retardation, barriers to p rogress and the role o f
seigneurial rights am ong th ose barriers; and a sen se o f the present as a
potential turning point in which properly calibrated legislation could shift the
future o f France on to a different track. T he w ays in which seigneurial rights
w ere con ceived at the on set o f revolution by the urban notable strata as w ell
as the nobility w ere exam ined in som e detail in Chapter 4. W e are con cern ed
in the present chapter w ith how th ese conceptualizations o f seigneurial
rights— and particularly their relation to the “feudal” — evolved as the depu
ties coped with the rural insurrection.1
We have stressed above, in our exam ination o f the cahiers in Chapters 2
and 3 , how peasants, nobles, and urban notables con ceived o f the seigneurial
rights as a bundle o f distinguishable claim s to be differentially evaluated. W e
saw, indeed, that (m e o f the hallmarks o f the staking-out o f positions in the
French countryside w as p recisely the careful delineation o f such distinctions.
B y contrast with a peasantry exquisitely sensitive to the realities o f each
and every claim as it em pirically existed in their ow n im m ediate experien ce,
the various revolutionary legislatures w ere necessarily concern ed w ith the
elaboration o f principles that could guide adm inistrative action in a w ide
diversity o f individualized locales. T h e categories em ployed by th ese bodies
in drafting and debating legislation for the country as a w hole w ere likely,
then, to em ploy a sim pler set o f distinctions, although conceivably m ore
m ysterious on es. T he tendency to abstract categorization that w as part and
p rocess o f the professional socialization o f the num erous body o f law yers
am ong the legislators m ade them em inently suited to the task o f developing
the categories needed to deal w ith this variegated body o f rights on a
national basis.
In exam ining the dilatory character o f the legislation on the seigneurial
rights in Chapter 8 w e con sidered the econom ic and political in terests at
play. In this chapter I con sider the legislation as an intellectual construction.
One elem ent in the endless legislative delay (it w as, for exam ple, seven
m onths after the August 4 -1 1 d ecrees established the distinction betw een
sim ple abolition and indem nification that the legislature clarified w hich
rights w ere in w hich category and yet another tw o m onths b efore the
indem nification rates w ere set) m ay w ell have been the sh eer intransigeance
o f the intellectual tasks.
1. The folowing discussion draws on John Markoff, “Sfowa i rseczy: buriuazja rewotucyjna
definhÿ system feudality,” in Andrzej Zybertowicz and Adam Czamota, eds., Interpntacje WieUriej
Thmsformacji Genoa kapitalixmu jako gmoa wspákzesndá (Warsaw; Kollegium Otrydoe,
1989), 357-82.
From the beginning, the seigneurial rights w ere regarded as interpretable

through the prism o f “feudal" rights and the w orking out o f the relationship
o f the one to the other category becam e one o f the central conceptual
m atters to b e w orked through in the search fo r legislative coh eren ce. T he
seigneurial rights, assim ilated to the category o f the feudal, then, w ere
legislated about in accord w ith the elaboration o f a discou rse about “ feudal
ism .” N ow the question perplexing th ose m em bers o f the assem bly charged
w ith drawing up the detailed legislation follow ing the night o f August 4 w as
discoverin g, deducing, o r inventing the m eaning o f the feu dal
T h e general cahiers o f the Third E state already show ed som e elem ents
o f a global con ception o f the “ feudal” elem ents in France. A s w e saw in
Chapter 4, the seigneurial rights w ere im plicitly seen as a totality in that
cahiers discussing any seigneurial right w ere prone to discuss the others
(and this m ay be contrasted with the nobility w ho experienced tw o distinct
groups o f seigneurial rights). T he Third E state, m oreover, often explicitly
addressed “ seigneurial rights” as a w hole, that term being used m ore-or-
less synonym ously w ith “feudal righ ts.” Finally, this w hole w as seen as
related to oth er institutions to be altered. W hile Third E state assem blies,
then, like the parishes or nobles, carefully distinguished on e right from
oth ers, they also show ed eviden ce o f a global conception that w as distinctly
theirs.
M y intention here is to underline a paradox. T he revolutionary leadership
in Paris tirelessly announced to them selves and to oth ers the existen ce o f a
clear rupture w ith the past, a past that w as frequently associated w ith the
term feudal; that, m oreover, insofar as this system burdened the country
people, they, the law givers o f the new France, w ere the rational and
con sciou s agents o f a transform ation in which the country people, in their
blind, violen t, and destructive w ay w ere also participating; and finally, that,
the new w orld in the making, w hile not as yet clearly defined, could be seen
as the antithesis o f the darkness o f the p a st On the level o f the m ost
general statem ents then w e find a contrast o f past darkness and future light,
not a w orld o f shadow s.
T h e paradox: w hen w e lod e beyond th ese m ore abstract and em otion
laden form ulations, everyw here w e find nothing but shades o f gray, w hich I
will indicate under three broad headings. F irst, in the period preceding the
Revolution, one finds the use o f “ feudal” instrum ents o f dom ination fo r
purposes that are not archaic in the le a st T he actions o f France’s rural lord s,
as the Revolution approached, in many w ays dem onstrate a participation in
quite a m odem set o f econom ic relationships, even though the legal language
through which their actions w ere en forced used the jargon o f the M iddle
A ges.
Second, w hen w e turn our attention to the m ental universe o f th ose w ho
upheld the claim s o f the rural lords prior to the R evolution, w e d iscover that
W ords and T hings 519
the justification o f those rights, by the late eighteenth century, w as often

exp ressed in term s already as thoroughly bou rgeois as on e could im agine.
If on e w ere to con ceive o f the Revolution as in part the replacem ent o f an
archaic aristocratic culture by a m odem bourgeois one, in which new sets o f
justifications for new form s o f econom ic activity laid the ideological ground
w ork upon which a m odem capitalist order w ould be con stru cted, one w ould
be disappointed: w hatever there w as that m ight reasonably be dubbed
“ feudal” in the late eighteenth century w as already justified on bourgeois
grounds, weD b efore the angry people o f the countryside set fire to
the châteaux.
Third, w hen w e exam ine the details, rather than the broad claim s o f th ose
w ho saw them selves as m odem Sokm s giving the Law to the new society ,
w e d iscover the exten t to which change w as to con sist in renam ing things,
and how little in altering the m aterial content o f the obligations o f the rural
population to th ose w ith claim s upon them (at least in the short ru n .) I shall
return to each o f these points below .
L et us pretend for a m om ent that the pow erful pressures on the legisla
ture that loom ed so large in Chapter 8’s account o f the legislative history did
n ot exist. W e thereby, again fo r the m om ent, ignore the rural insurrections
that they had to deal w ith, the Parisian pressures that altered the political
configuration o f the assem blies, the financial disaster, and the rising tensions
that ultim ately becam e large-scale w arfare. If one w ere to lim it on e’s
scrutiny to the various revolutionary legislatures in this w ay, cme m ight w ell
describe the assem blies as groping for a definition o f feudal rights and then
trying to apply that definition to the specific claim s o f French lords in ord er
to distinguish th ose to be abolished from th ose to be treated otherw ise.
This w ould be to present the legislative history as though it derived from a
conception o f what w as and what w as not feudal. T he cahiers m ake quite
clear that in the bright new m odem w orld, what w as feudal had no place.
T he “ feudal” evok ed a w orld o f fragm ented sovereignty, d v il violen ce, and
econom ic retardation as w ell as local, corporate, and personal privilege.
T h ese w ere to be done away with in the nam e o f national unity, humanity,
econom ic advance, and juridical equality o f d tizen s. In this very general
sen se, abolishing feudal rights undoubtedly fit the general con ception s o f
many deputies about what w as desirable in the new w orld in the m aking. If,
how ever, w e look m ore d o se ly at how “ abolish” and “ feudal” w ere defined
in actual legislative practice after the ringing declarations o f A ugust 1789,
one finds quite a different p rocess. Instead o f actions being driven by ideas,
the w ays in w hich the detailed legislation defined “ feudal” w ere quite plainly
attem pts at constructing a rationale from which actions to be taken could
appear to be derived. And th ose definitions-in-practice w ere exceedingly
narrow on es.
If it pleased the deputies to sw eep away “ the sad rem nants o f the feudal
regim e" and experien ce them selves, som etim es exhSaratingly, as m oving
France from darkness to light, it w as also pleasing to define the feudal
regim e so that it fit what w as being sw ept away (and did not fit what the
deputies hoped to p reserve). T he clarity w ith w hich the deputies hoped to
define the feudal, so that the light could appear in the greatest contrast to the
dark, w as difficult to recon cile w ith the con crete com plexity o f institutions.
It is the coexisten ce o f a broad (and ever broader) notion o f a feudal past
w hose total abolition is a m om ent o f w orld transform ation w ith a narrow
definition that left m any peasant obligations substantially unaltered (but that
w as su bject to change under pressu re) that gives the intellectual history o f
the con cep t o f the feudal its ow n special dynam ic. T h e legislators coukl
proclaim to them selves and their enthusiastic supporters how radically they
had changed the w orld and could also sternly tell the peasants how m uch
they still ow ed the sam e people as before. T h e people o f the countryside,
how ever, could use the broader conception to try to resist the narrow er
one— and thereby, after bitter battle, m ake the broader on e m ore real. This
conjunction bequeathed to the future in which w e live a rich and pow erful
conceptual heritage: the presen t w as bom in a sharp break w ith the past;
the contribution o f educated elites to the Revolution w as in the realm o f
ideas and that o f plebeians w as violen ce; the fusion o f those ideas and that
violen ce effected the transform ation o f the old into the new .
From Fiefs to Epochs: A Word Expands

In the spring o f 1789 a good num ber o f assem blies w ere already using the
term “ feudal" (n ot, let m e stress, “ seigneurial” ) as a gen eric term fo r a
kind o f society , and a particularly repugnant kind indeed. “ Feudal” and
“ seigneurial” w ere often used as interchangeable variants, but the form er
w as som etim es used to indicate som e sort o f social totality (as in “ feudal
regim e” ) w hereas the latter generally had the m ore con crete referen ce o f
an aggregate o f sp ecific righ ts.2 One frequently finds the w ord feudal form ing
2. The following draws on Régine Robin, "Fief et seigneurie dans le droit et l’idéologie juridique
à la fin du XVnie siècle,” Annales historiques de la Révolutionfrançaise 43 (1971): 554-602; Claude
Mazauric, "Note sur l’emploi du ’régime féodal’ et de ‘féodalité’ pendant la Révolution Française,” in
Sur la Révolution Française: Contributions à Hiistoire de la Révolution bourgeoise (Paris: Editions
Sociales, 1970), 119-34; Alain Guerreau, "Fief, féodalité, féodalisme. Enjeux sociaux et réflexion
historienne,” Annales: Economies, Sociétés, Civilisations 45 (1990): 134-66; Rolf Reichardt and
Eberhard Schmitt, "La Révolution Française—rupture ou continuité? Pour une conceptualisation
phis nuancée,” in Rolf Reichardt and Eberhard Schmitt, eds., Ancien Regime: Aufklärung und
Revolution (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1983), 4-71; Diego Venturino, "La naissance de l’Anden Régime,"
in Cohn Lucas, The French Revolution and the Creation of a Modem Political Culture, 2:11-40;
Emst Hinrichs, ” ‘Feudahtät’ und Ablösung. Bemerkungen zur Vorgeschichte des 4. August 1789,”
Words and Things S21
part o f a picture o f an odious past that unfortunately is not altogether dead,

and that th erefore needs to be given the final blow . T he Third E state o f
Poitou for exam ple: “ I t fo r many centuries, France languished in ignorance,
anarchy and confusion, th ose w ere the centuries o f the feudal regim e, w hen
the seigneurs, enjoying their usurped authority, crushed p ossession s and
persons alike under an equal servitude. T h e odious tim e o f personal
servitude has at last disappeared; or, if in som e parts o f the realm , the right
o f mainmorte still exercises its em pire, this r ig h t .. . cannot fail to disappear
soon in its turn” (4 P 5:412).
“ Feudal regim e” as used here identifies a historical epoch w ith a set o f
social institutions, rather than a phase in an unfolding history o f the
relationship o f G od and hum anity.3 Sacred history has becom e transm uted
into social history. Instead o f tim e divided into an old ord er and a Christian
era by the appearance o f G od, the will o f the French people w as dividing
tim e into a barbarous past and a future (presen t?) o f liberty. T h e existing
seigneurial institutions em bodied fo r m any the vestiges o f barbarism in their
rem iniscences o f ancient degradation. T h e honor o f humanity, the Third
E state o f A vesnes declares, “ requires that even the m em ory o f such
barbarian practices be lost” (Á P 2:153).
But o f cou rse the m em ory w as not to be lost at all: for the revolutionaries,
the vision o f feudal barbarism becam e p recisely the standard against w hich
the achievem ents o f the present age and the p erfection o f th ose achieve
m ents in the near future w ere to b e m easured. C onsider the cahier o f the
Third E state o f Draguignan. It is against the background o f the “ still existing
vestiges o f the servitude o f our fathers” that this present “ m om ent o f the
rebirth o f the rights o f man” is set in relief. A referen ce to “ the usurpation
carried out under the w eak su ccessors o f Charlem agne" serves to quickly
sketch a set o f social practices that, w e are told, it w ould be outrageous to
describe by the term “ legitim ate.” It is by contrast that one can glim pse the
vision o f a w orld o f voluntary agreem ents that m ight, in the contem porary
France o f 1789, d eserve such a characterization. We get som e idea o f what
liberty, property, and p rogress in the useful arts m ight be by contrasting
these principles w ith the barriers to “ natural liberty.” “ T h e dignity o f man”
is portrayed by contrast to various claim s o f the lords; and the con cep t o f
“ the in terest o f the state” is seen as requiring a rem edy fo r the “ m ortal
wound” w orked by the seigneurial rights (Â P 3 :2 6 0 -6 1 ).
This single docum ent ju st cited m anaged to com bine many o f the current
m ajor critiques o f “ the sad rem nants o f the feudal regim e” into a single
in Eberhard Schmitt, ed., Die Französische Revolution (Cologne: Kiepenheuer und Whach, 1976),
124-57; Gerd van den Heuvel, “Féodalité, Féodal,” in Rolf Reichardt and Eberhard Schmitt,
eds., Handbuch politisch-sozialer Grundbegriffe in Frankreich 1680-1820 (Munich: Oldenbourg,
1968), 10:7-54.
3. Guerrean, “Fief, féodalité, féodalisme.”
series o f paragraphs: that it constituted an affront to individual liberty and to

human dignity; that it hindered com m erce and devastated agriculture; that
it fragm ented state authority; that it w as incom patible w ith the rights o f
property. All that is m issing for the particular text to constitute a com plete
litany o f the com plaints laid at the d oor o f the feudal regim e (as o f 1789)
w ould be to couple it with ecclesiastical abu ses.4
For what w e find in the cahiers o f the Third E state considered togeth er is
a very stron g tendency to link the existing seigneurial rights (som etim es
described as the rem nants o f the feudal past, som etim es not) w ith a w ide
variety o f oth er criticism s o f the social order. To again recall Chapter 4 : the
many proposals for econom ic liberalism , largely directed against state
hindrances to the m arket are sim ilarly, if perhaps secondarily, directed
against seigneurial claim s o f various sorts, notably m onopolies, tolls, and
corvées. T he cham pions o f a unitary state, on the other hand, are particularly
hostile to m anifestations o f a fragm ented sovereignty and w ish the dism em
berm ent o f the seigneurs’ claim s to adm inister ju stice in their ow n cou rts.
T he proponents o f agricultural grow th are hostile to the irrationality o f the
lords’ claim s on the harvest, which d estroy any incentive to innovate. W hat
there is in the w ay o f antagonism to aspects o f the activities o f the Church
is linked to a critique o f the lords as w e ll A ll this can be seen in the cahiers
o f the spring.
In their explicit usage, term s such as droitsféodaux o r droits seigneuriaux
refer, o f cou rse, to various obligations ow ed a lord, but it is striking that
im plicitly these term s had acquired already by the spring o f 1789 a very
m uch broader if inexplicit significance. T h ose docum ents that speak with
particular bitterness or at particular length about these rights also tend to
d evote them selves to discussions o f oth er institutional arenas and issu es,
specifically th ose w e have ju st m entioned: issu es o f econom ic blockage, o f
ecclesiastical abuse, o f a w ide-ranging structure o f privilege in all arenas oí
French society. Although any num ber o f m edievalists have attem pted to
assure us that the term “ feudal” has little m eaning when applied to the late
eighteenth century,5 Chapter 4 has show n that the droits féodaux w ere
experien ced as an absolutely central institution, profoundly linked to m any
oth er con cern s for social change. T he intense and nationw ide discussion o f
French institutions seem s to have tightened these linkages. T h e sen se that
4. For a survey of eighteenth-century antifeudal literature, see John Q. C. Mackrefl, TheAttack

oh "Feudalism" m Eighteenth-Century France (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973). This
eighteenth-century literature itself had a long ancestry as the champions of royalism from at least
the sixteenth century excoriated the benighted past On pre-eighteenth-century antifeudal history
writing, see Harold A. Ellis, Boulainvilliers and the French Monarchy. Aristocratic fíttitics m Early
Eighteenth-Century France (Ithaca: Cornel University Press, 1988), 31-51.
5. See, for example, Robert Boutruche, Seigneurie etféodalité, le premierAge des tiens d’homme
à homme (Paris: Aubier, 1968).
this w as a m om ent o f transition, a m om ent w hen France seem ed poised

betw een disintegration and rebirth, w as expressed by (and also fueled by)
the w idespread deploym ent o f neologism s, w hose jarring new ness reflected
(but also stim ulated) the sen se o f institutional flu x.6 And old w ords could be
dusted o ff for use and in use be them selves transform ed: “ dem ocracy,” 7
“ revolu tion ,” 8— and “ feudal righ ts.”
B y August 4 , the incorporation o f a range o f institutions under the “ feudal”
had broadened. F irst o f all certain specific institutions w ere associated with
the seigneurial rights under the feudal rubric in w ays that w ere not y et in
(dace the previous M arch. Thus the discussion on August 4 touched on
many m atters and the sum m ary statem ent includes tax privileges, venal
officeholding, the expen ses o f obtaining ju stice, the privileges o f provinces
and tow ns, im properly obtained governm ent pensions, various paym ents to
the Vatican, and the guilds. T he draft legislation presented on the follow ing
day as a basis for discussion adds the casuels o f the clergy, the increase o f
the portion congrue, and the practice o f holding m ultiple ben efices. T h e
ringing opening sen ten ce o f the final d ecree voted cm August 11 gives what
is being d estroyed a broader nam e than “ feudal,” let alone “ seigneurial,”
rights. It is now som e m ore gen eric entity o f which these rights are a
com ponent, it is a feudal “regim e” that is entirely d estroyed .9 It is to a
lexically appropriate C om m ittee chi Feudal (n ot Seigneurial) Rights that the
task o f spelling out the details was confided.
In the sen se o f a gen eric term denoting not a particular structure o f
econ om ic ties, political authority, or m ilitary obligation but an entire state o f
civilization, em bracing, to be sure, econom ic ties, political authority, and
m ilitary obligation, the precedent w as set a half-century earlier by the
w ritings o f B oulainvilliers,10 w ho w as attem pting to defend the position o f
6. Philippe Roger, “Le dictionnaire contre la Révolution,” StanfordFrench Review 14 (1990): 72.
7. "Democrat” seems to have emerged from the theoretical treatises of classically educated
intellectuals into the discourse about contemporaneous events in the low countries in the 1780s.
See Robert R. Palmer, TheAge oftheDemocraticRevolution (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1959), 1:15.
8. Keith Michael Baker, “Inventing the French Revolution,” in his Inventing the French
Revolution: Essays on French Political Culture m the Eighteenth Century (New York; Cambridge
University Press, 1990), 203-23; Roger Bamy, “La formation du concept de ‘révolution’ dans la
Révolution,” in Michel \foveBe, ed., L'image de la Révolution française: Communications présentées
lors du Congrès Mondialpour le Bicentenaire de la Révolution, 1:433-39; Alain Roy, "Révolution":
Histoire dun mot (Paris: Gallimard, 1989); Rolf Reichardt and Hans-Jürgen Lflsebrink, “Révolution
à la fin du 18e siècle. Pour une relecture d’un concept-dé du siècle des Lumières,” Mots 16
(1988): 35-68.
9. A convenient comparative summary of the three texts is in Patrick Kessel, La nuitdu 4 août
1789 (Paris: Arthaud, 1969), 320-26.
10. François Furet and Mona Ozouf, “Deux légitimations historiques de la société française au
XVnie siècle: Mabiy et Boulainvilliers,” Annales: Economies, Sociétés, Civilisations 34 (1979):
436-50.
the nobility against the various form s o f royal usurpation carried out ov er
the centuries, indeed, in his view , from the very beginnings o f the Capetian
m onarchy. W hile no one had yet explicitly spelled out the con ception o f an
entire feudal society (to appropriate the title o f M arc B loch’s great b ook ),
the grievance lists o f the spring o f 1789 em body such a notion im plicitly.
T h e term “ feudal,” like all referen ce to the M iddle A ges, took on a
denunciatory quality. “ G oth ic,” like “ feudal,” cam e to stand fo r the rejected
past. In condem ning th ose engaged in destroyin g the artw orks o f F rance’s
cultural heritage, one revolutionary legislator probably invented the m odem
use o f “ vandalism . ” u And m ost strikingly w e see the degree to w hich in
their public pageantry, their invocations o f h eroic nam es, their literary
m etaphors, the revolutionary bourgeoisie leaped back over the M iddle A ges
to em brace G reek and Latin antiquity. In short, “ the feudal regim e” w as
already by the sum m er o f 1789 becom ing a sum mary term that evok ed
alm ost the entire social ord er being destroyed. This w as a considerable
broadening o f the term in only a few m onths. “ T he feudal regim e” in that
first sum m er o f Revolution did not yet em brace the m onarchy, the king
being celebrated as “ the restorer o f French liberty” in the final article o f the
d ecree o f August 11— but 1789 was not yet 1793.1 12
1
A s the principles developed in the legislation o f M arch 1790, how ever,
gave w ay to the radical shift anticipated in the spring o f 1792 and m ore fully
em bodied in the laws o f the follow ing August— the shifting o f the burden o f
p roof in con tested cases to the lords as w ell as m aking m ore rights su bject
to uncom pensated abolition (se e Chapter 8, p. 465)— the lexical clim ate
shifted again. B y August 1792, as Claude M azauric has pointed out, “ feudal
regim e” gave w ay to the even m ore abstract “ féodalité,” which had a u n e to
be freely em ployed as a rather generalized pejorative for all that w as absurd,
illegitim ate, or backward in the O ld R egim e.13 W hen G régoire cam e to issu e
his im portant report on the French language, he spoke o f the future as “ the
epoch w hen th ese feudal idiom s shall have disappeared. ” 14
11. Catherine VblptHac, Dany Ha4ja4j, and Jean-Louis Jam, "Des vandales au vandalisme,” in
Simone Bernard-Griffiths, Marie-Claude Chemin, and Jean Ehrard, Révolution française et “vanda
lisme révolutionnaire" (Paris: Universitas, 1992), 15-27.
12. Rethinking the image of collective madness evoked by the night of August 4 from a vantage
point a few years down the road past the king’s trial, the lawyer A.-C. Thibaudeau considered that,
in retrospect, the most genuinely deranged element of that night’s many unusual acts was honoring
Louis XVI (Antoine-Claire Thibaudeau, Mémoires, 1765-1792 [Paris: Champion, 1875], 96). We
shall consider below how monarchy came, for the revolutionaries, to join the feudal regime.
13. L’abolition de la féodalité dans le monde occidental (Paris: Editions du Centre National de b
Recherche Scientifique, 1971), 2:502-3.
14. Henri Grégoire, “Rapport sur la nécessité et les moyens d’anéantir les patois et d’universaK-
ser l'usage de la langue française,” in Michel de Certeau, DominiqueJuba, andJacques Revel, eds.,
Une politique de la langue. La Révolution française et les patois: L'enquite de Grégoire (Paris;
Gallimard, 1975), 302.
Words and T hings S25
W e have then the im age o f a radical break w ith the past, energized by the
w isdom o f the law givers in conjunction with the anger o f the country p eople.
T h ere is an illustration in the Cabinet des Estam pes o f the B ibliothèque
Nationale that m agnificently represents this im age o f the alliance against a
Inroad con cep t o f feudalism .15 Labeled “ the night o f August 4 -5 or patriotic
exaltation,” it depicts the m uscular arm s o f the country people w ielding
agricultural im plem ents to strike at a pile o f noble and clerical ob jects.
Perhaps a grouping o f three m en in breech es pounding away is to rem ind us
o f the patriotic representatives o f the three ord ers w ho, as the National
A ssem bly, passed the historic d ecree. (O ther engravings o f the day show a
very sim ilar threesom e in dress that clearly identifies them w ith the three
ord ers; here the trio has a distinctly rustic and popular c a s t) A lready broken
by the blow s are several sw ords; a coat-of-arm s is being tram pled, bishops’
staffs and clerical garb are cm the ground, too, but not y et dam aged as far
as I can see (and an unm olested village church stands seren ely in the
background). We have here the violen ce o f the people represen ted as fused
w ith the actions o f the National A ssem bly. That violen ce is directed against
the sym bols o f noble and clerical privilege (but not the church as such)
rather than against anything specifically restricted to seigneurial paym ents.
N ow that the law givers had risen to their historic m ission, to be sure,
further popular violen ce w ould be harder to regard as having a ¡dace in the
n ecessary destruction o f the old order.
Lawyers Make Distinctions:

A Word Contracts
But w hile the National A ssem bly in the sum m er o f 1789 w as elaborating an
im age o f a total break with a past for which “ feudal regim e” w as a convenient
sum m ary label, the Com m ittee on Feudal Rights o f that very sam e assem bly,
in the cou rse o f preparing the detailed legislation on precisely what w as
abolished, w as pursuing a very different tack.
B y Septem ber 1789, w hen the term feudal had already taken on for many
the broadest o f associations, the chair o f the Com m ittee on Feudal R ights,
M erlin de Douai, reported on the n ecessity for som e definitional precision.
W hile such term s as droits féodaux, he pointed out, “ in their m ost rigorous
sen se only designate those rights that derive from a fie f con tract” (A P
8:5 2 4 ), plainly som ething broader was intended, som ething he designates,
apparently lacking an appropriate French phrase, by follow ing the sixteenth-
15. A reproduction appears on the cover ofJeanNicolas, ed, Mouvementspopulaires et conscience

sociale, XVIe-XlXe siècles (Paris: Malotne, 1985).
century ju rist DumouUn's expression complexion feudale. In the invocation

o f Dum oulin’s tw o-centuries-old Latin, m oreover, there is a significant
intim ation that Dumoulin him self w as describing som ething already quite
old, but that continued to be barely alive in a later century. If the dead skin
o f social relations that constituted the complexum could be stripped off,
som e fully up-to-date institutions could em erge, for w hich m eaningful French
nam es could be noted; unlike the struggle to find a nam e for th ese dessicated
institutional ruins, the new nam es w ould be obvious. Yet the difficulty o f
naming what it w as that shall be the ob ject o f legislation did not su ggest to
M erlin any potential for am biguity or arbitrariness: “ T he ob ject o f our w ork
is unequivocal" (AP 8:524).
Just as the broadening o f “ feudal" into a generalized condem nation o f the
old ord er w as prefigured in the cahiers o f the spring, so w as M erlin’s
approach to a m ore restricted m eaning, which w ould not, how ever, b e the
antiquarian restriction o f regarding “ féodal” as the adjectival form o f “ fie f.”
T he cahiers o f the spring, in fact, bear eloquent testim ony to the lack o f
interest in “ droits féodaux” in M erlin’s m ost rigorous sen se: as w e saw in
Chapter 2 there w ere few discussions o f the various institutions that to the
legal-m inded signified a vassal's acknow ledgm ent o f his lord and even less
interest in the lord’s occasional attem pted exercise o f his alleged prerogative
to tem porarily seize the land o f th ose w ho w ithheld such acknow ledgm ent
N or w ere discussions involving the distinctions betw een fiefs and other
form s o f tenure (censives, alleux, emphytéoses) m uch o f a su bject fo r lively
discussion (se e Chapter 2, pp. 52, 60).
To the exten t that the urban notables in their cahiers m eant som ething
specific by droits féodaux, then, it w as hardly lim ited to fiefs and indeed had
little to do with fiefs at all. A s the term “ feudal" w as taking on ev er broader
im plications in political d iscou rse, the law yers found no sen se w hatever in a
narrow er usage derived from the archaic bonds am ong the m em bers o f a
dom inant w arrior class. If they shared with som e tw entieth-century m edi
evalists the view that such a usage had little bearing on the m odem
eighteenth century, they w ere also participating in a historical m om ent in
which the term w as a fixture o f ordinary speech , perhaps m ore so than ever
before— or sin ce. In the cou rse o f his w ork w ith the C om m ittee on Feudal
Rights follow ing the August 4 -1 1 d ecrees, M erlin th erefore takes it to be
his conceptual task to distinguish those rights that are fully part o f the
complexum feudale and th erefore are to sim ply disappear, from th ose that
partake o f the saving grace o f legitim ate private property and are th erefore
to be elim inated only upon paym ent o f an indem nity. Ib is w as a daunting
task indeed: in spite o f M erlin’s confident announcem ent in Septem ber that
the identity o f the complexum feudale w as unequivocal, it surely w as
equivocal in the extrem e.
B oth in daily practice and in ideological justification, “ feudal” and m odem
practices and conception s w ere so com pletely intertw ined that the attem pt
to abolish the form er in ord er to em ancipate the latter w as, on the level o f
detail, a h opeless p ro je ct T he only realization o f this p roject w as on
the level o f an abstract conception o f a total break betw een tw o clearly
distinguishable social ord ers. Rather than a sharp distinction o f bou rgeois
and feudal form s and practices, what w e find on the level o f detailed reality
as w ell as detailed discussion is an intertw ining o f the tw o: not so m uch
the d ea r opposition suggested by the abstract condem nations o f pre
revolutionary publicists or the revolutionary d ecrees but an everyday blend
verging on syncretism .
A Feudal-Modem Mélange
I shall enlarge upon the foregoin g observations under tw o broad headings
that togeth er provide a con text fo r appreciating M erlin’s intellectual con
struction.
• T h e specific claim s that w ere m ade on peasant resou rces cannot be

divided into those that w ere part o f an archaic econom y and those that
w ere part o f a m odem econom y.
• T h e language o f disputes about particular claim s did not appear as a
con flict betw een archaic prinriples and m odem on es; rather, all sp ecific
disputes tended to be debated in m odem term s.
T h e result o f th ese tw o propositions w as that on e could “ abolish” the

“ feudal” by relabeling it as “ p roperty.” The changes in certain peasant
obligations that w ere held to follow from the abolition o f feudalism w ere
th erefore quite m od est
Traditional Claims and Modem Purposes (or Using the Old to

Obtain the New)
T he m achinery to en force traditional claim s w as being used for quite m odem
purposes. A generation o f historians devoted m uch energy and ingenuity to
debating the thesis o f a feudal reaction according to which the w eight o f
feudal o r seigneurial burdens was actually stepped up in the im m ediately
pre-revolutionary p eriod .16 A great deal o f the debate con cern s not the
16. The alleged seigneurial reaction has sometimes been seen as part of a broader and even
more debatable “aristocratic reaction” in which the old orders struggled increasingly for control of
the state, for restrictions on the advancement of commoners as weD as a reinforced structure of
reality, but the novelty, o f the augm entation o f seigneurial claim s, with
som e historians seein g a cyclical pattern rather than a distinctively pre
revolutionary one and oth ers seein g a long-term and quasi-perm anent
p rocess. W hat is o f interest here is the diversity o f m echanism s em ployed
by the lords o f the late eighteenth century: the rem aking o f land surveys
item izing their proper claim s; the em ploym ent o f legal specialists to discover
every last sou that could be squeezed out o f the peasantry; the em ploym ent
o f the right o f option by virtue o f which a lord could purchase any land a
peasant dependent attem pted to sell; the enforcem ent (o r even the inven
tion) o f claim s on pastures and forests that crippled the access o f peasants
to form erly available collective resou rces o f the rural com m unity; the
deliberate failure to en force dues over a num ber o f years, follow ed by a
legally en forceable dem and that the arrears be paid at on ce; the attem pt to
en close the lord 's ow n fields and thereby rem ove this land from the collective
a ccess o f the rural com m unity (and if som e peasants w ere th ereby throw n
from poverty into desperation, their land m ight be purchased by the lord ).
It is far from clear, how ever, that this is very m eaningfully characterized
as a “ feudal” reaction in any o f the sen ses in which that term is likely to be
used by today’s historians. For all the m edieval term inology em ployed by
the law yers w ho served the lords as defenders o f such actions, it is at least
as reasonable to see th ese activities as the attem pt o f a landowning class to
increase its capacity to produce for a grow ing national m arket A s cities
flourished; as road netw orks grew ; as the standing arm y consum ed m ore
h orses, food , textiles; as the state bureaucrats continued their elaborate
shipbuilding program in the vain hope o f rivaling England on the seas—
the dem ands for grain, m eat, leather, hem p, and w ood rose dram atically.
We are not dealing here so m uch with lords trying to revive an aging
m edieval econom y but w ith landholders trying to position them selves to
take advantage o f expanding m arket opportunities. B y dispossessin g their
peasant dependents, gaining increasing and undivided control o f land, and
making peasant sm allholding as precarious as possible (th ereby forcin g
peasants to sell ou t), the substantial landholders not only expanded and
consolidated their ow n holdings but also expanded the landless rural proletar
iat w ho w ere needed as agricultural laborers on th ose expanded holdings (o r
w ho w orked for urban m erchants in the expanding rural cottage-based
textile in du stries).17
the collection of seigneurial dues. For various positions, see William Doyle, “Was There an
Aristocratic Reaction in Pre-Revolutionary France?” in DouglasJohnson, ed., French Society and the
Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), 3-28; Reichardt and Schmitt, “Rupture
ou continuité?”; Albert Soboul, "Sur le prélèvement féodal,” in his Problèmes paysans de la
Révolution, 1789-1848 (Paris: Maspero, 1983), 89-115; and D. M. G. Sutherland, France,
1789-1815: Revolution and Counterrevolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 70-72.
17. Rural industry was probably expanding as merchant-employers reduced labor costs by
Words and Things 529
T he form s and language surrounding an expansion o f the lord’s activities

m ay have been “ feudal, ” but what o f the content? If the dom inant rural
strata w ere able to use the custom ary claim s em bodied in the term inology
o f the m edieval past to increase their capacity to rationalize production on
their ow n esta tes for the m arket, if they could em ploy the language o f the
M iddle A ges w hile abandoning w hatever there m ight on ce have been by
w ay o f patrim onial responsibilities to the underclass, ought w e to speak o f
"feudalism ” at all? T he answ er is y es if w e want to em ploy the vocabulary
o f the O ld Regim e, but is very likely no if w e are trying to identify a social
order sharply differentiated from the capitalist era.
W hen the French peasantry rose against the so-called feudal and seigneur
ial rights in 1789, th erefore, w e m ight w ell w onder w hether this w as not so
m uch as part o f a triumphant vanguard action in alliance w ith the revolution
ary bourgeoisie against a dying feudalism , as it w as a rearguard struggle
against a developing rural capitalism .18 Indeed there is a considerable recen t
polem ical literature on this qu estion .19 T h e debate could g o on a long tim e,
since the intertw ining o f "feudal” and "capitalist” actions was so profound
that contem porary historians have no greater su ccess in achieving any
consensus on the assignm ent o f French institutions to one o r another
avoiding the urban guilds as well as hiring workers embedded in rural families with some revenue
from agricultural lab«'.
18. Georges Lefebvre has some particularly pointed remarks on the anticapitalist aspect of
peasant action in 1789 and beyond. See Georges Lefebvre, “La Révolution française et les paysans,”
in Etudes sur la Révolution Française (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1963), 343. That
the actual exploitation of noble holdings was carried out in as bourgeois a spirit as can be imagined
is shown in several works of Robert Forster The Nobility of Toulouse in the Eighteenth Century
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1960); “The Noble Wine Producers of the Bordelais in
the Eighteenth Century,” Economic History Review 14 (1961): 18-33; “The Provincial Noble: A
Reappraisal,” American Historical Review 68 (1963): 681-91. For appraisals of the debate around
Lefebvre's viewpoint, see Peter M. Jones, “Georges Lefebvre and the French Revolution: Fifty
Years On,” French Historical Studies 16 (1990): 645-63; Peter McPhee, “The French Revolution,
Peasants and Capitalism,” American Historical Review 5 (1989): 1265-80. Barrington Moore,
reviewing his own comparative examination of revolution and rural class relations from seventeenth-
century England to twentieth-century Asia, has formulated a mournful generalization: “The chief
social basis of radicalism has been the peasants and the smaller artisans in the towns. From these
facts one may conclude that the wellsprings of human freedom lie not only where Marx saw them,
in the aspirations of classes about to take power but perhaps even more in the dying wad of a class
over whom the wave of progress is about to roll”; see his Social Origins of Dictatorship and
Democracy: Lord andPeasant in the Makingofthe Modem World (Boston: Beacon, 1966), 505.
19. In addition to the works cited in the previous note, see Florence Gauthier, La voie paysanne
dans la Révolution française: L’exemple de ta Picardie (Paris: Maspero, 1977); Ado, Kresfianskoe
dvùhenie; Albert Soboul, ed., Contributions à ¡"histoire paysanne de la Révolution française (Paris:
Editions Sociales, 1977); Guy-Robert Dmi, "Le mouvement paysanen Picardie: Meneurs, pratiques,
maturation et signification historique,” in Florence Gauthier and Guy-Robert Ikni, eds., La Guerre
du Blé au XVHIe siècle: La critique populaire contre le libéralisme économique au XVlIIe siècle
(Montreuil: Editions de la Passion, 1988), 187-203.
category than did M erlin in finding a classification o f seigneurial rights into

“ feudal” versus “ legitim ate property” that could retain w idespread assent
w hen challenged.
Defending Old Rights with New Ideas (or Using

the New to Maintain the Old)
If the actual enforcem ent o f the droitsféodaux seem s to fit a capitalist m odel
o f social relationships about as w ell as it d oes a feudal on e, the sam e m ay be
said for the justificatory legitim ations invoked by defenders o f the seigneurial
system . One certainly d oes find what w e m ay call the aristocratic defense
o f the structures o f rural dom ination: nam ely the daim that the seigneurial
rights are a constituent part o f a structure o f hierarchical dom ination on
which a proper social ord er depends, in which each has his proper place but
in which there are many different places (see Chapter 3, p. 86). C onsider
the language used in a lawsuit brought by the m arquis o f C astelm oron in
1776 against peasant violators o f his exd u sive rights to bear arm s and hunt
“ the natural liberty to hunt having been lim ited and restrained by the
m ores o f peoples and the laws o f sovereigns and a few oth er person s, he
nevertheless observes with pain that there are vile and m echanical persons
w ho undertake hunting, w ith firearm s and otherw ise, on the land and
seigneurie o f the said C astelm oron w here the seigneur has the right o f high,
m iddle and low ju stice and consequently the capadty to forbid hunting and
to hunt him self.’'20
A ssertions o f the essential character o f status distinction d o som etim es
m ake their appearance in the noble cahiers, quite literally in the case o f the
nobility o f Bazas, which, in its discussion o f seigneurial rights, contends “ that
it is o f the essen ce o f m onarchical governm ent that there be distinctions o f
status, so that m oderation in ideas m ay be maintained and subordination in
the behavior and conduct o f all m en m ay be p reserved” (A P 2 :2 6 8 ). (T his is
the line o f argum ent that M ontesquieu had pursued w ith a special v ig or.)21
T h e nobles o f N ivernais e t D onzois add that being publicly singled ou t b y
virtue o f clear and visible status distinctions m akes nobles fe e l they m ust
live up to the qualities o f their ancestors (A P 4:2 5 3 ). H ere w e find som ething
close to the argum ent that the recognition o f privilege need not m erely b e
seen as a rew ard for responsibility, but that it is also a spur to, a sou rce o f
20. Cited in Anne-Marie Cocula-VnBièrea, “La contestation des privilèges seigneuriaux dans le
fonds des Eaux et Forêts. L’exemple acquitam dans la seconde moitié du XVŒe siècle,” in Jean
Nicolas, ed., Mouvements populares et conscience sociale, XVle-XIXt siècles (Paris: Mahne,
1985), 211.
21. De Fespritdes lois (Paris: Société Les Belles Lettres, 1950), book 5, chap. 9.
responsibility. H elp us put on the m ask o f authority, the N ivernais nobles

urge, and our faces w ill grow to fit that m ask.22
In one o f the m ost careful efforts o f Louis XV I to align him self w ith the
new ord er o f things, the king em braced the abandonm ent o f the three
estates y et m aintained that a valuable and hereditary distinction adhered to
the nobility: “ everything that rem inds a nation o f the antiquity and continuity
o f the serv ices o f an honored race constitutes a distinction that nothing can
d estroy .” H e concluded that “ those w ho, in all classes o f society , aspire to
serve their country effectively, and those w ho have already had the happi
ness o f serving it, have an in terest in respectin g this transm ission o f titles
or o f m em ories, the m ost beautiful o f all the legacies on e can pass cm to
on e’s children” (A P 11:430).
Such an aristocrat’s defen se o f the rural social ord er is unsurprising, to
be sure; far m ore interesting is the degree to which the defen ders o f
seigneurial claim s had, by the spring o f 1789, thoroughly assim ilated the
notion o f private property as a sacred area beyond the legitim ate reach o f
m arauders (agents o f the state m ost pointedly included) and w orthy o f
defen se by any properly constituted governing authority (se e pp. 34, 86,
188). W e are likely to associate the m odem idea o f property, w hen w e
con sider the fragm ented nature o f rights over land em bodied in the “ sad
rem nants o f the feudal regim e” o f the eighteenth century, w ith the physio
crats’ advocacy o f an absolute property, all rights over w hich are the
ow ner’s .23
From this point o f view , what is striking about many o f the cahiers in
which the nobility defend their claim s on peasant revenues and d eferen ce,
is that the claim rests p recisely on assim ilating the feudal or seigneurial
rights to private property, thereby conceiving o f them as inviolable. E ven
the nobles o f Bazas, cited above for their defen se o f a hierarchical social
ord er, also speak o f their “ distinctions and prerogatives” as “ property w hich
no pow er on earth m ay infringe” (A P 2 :2 6 7 -6 8 ). O r con sider the nobles o f
Saintonge, so insistent that their property rights (conflated w ith their
“ liberty” ) be defended by their deputies and for whom property includes a
long list o f seigneurial claim s including fiefs (A P 5:665).
O ne o f the few noble cahiers actually to defend the continued existen ce o f
fiefs, then, m ounts its defen se in the language o f property rights. A re they
defending “ feudalism ” ? Em bracing “ capitalism ” ? T he nobles o f this district,
like many o f their fellow s, have m ounted a defen se o f feudal claim s (even in
22. The arresting image of a face conforming to a mask is used to good effect in James Scott’s
magnificent essay Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven; Yale
University Press, 1990), 10-11. Scott got it from George Orwell’s "Shooting an Elephant,” in
Inside the Whale and OtherEssays (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1962), 95-96.
23. For an interesting recent exposition, see Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Origins of Physiocracy,
200-201, 228.
the m ost rigorous sen se o f rights associated w ith fiefs) in term s that are
quite “ bou rgeois.” This characteristic o f their cahiers is not m erely a
desperate last-ditch attem pt by the nobility on the ev e o f the R evolution to
adopt the term s o f their enem ies. Regine Robin24 has show n that eighteenth-
century manuals and treatises chi feudal and seigneurial rights had already
a d o p t«! such bourgeois term s o f discourse by deriving obligations fro n
contracts freely entered into by tw o parties. T he defenders o f the “ feudal”
w ere already d o s e to speaking o f a w orld o f creditors and debtors engaged
in legitim ate interchanges betw een freely consenting equals, structured by
property relations. N either the manuals studied by Robin nor m ost o f the
noble cahiers I have explored defend a social order in which landholding was
part o f a hierarchical system o f political dom ination bound togeth er by
obligations o f mutual support am ong unequals in which the superior party
provided protection , the inferior aid.
T he cahiers o f the Third E state are d o s e in sp irit C onsider the cahier
adopted by the Third E state o f N em ours, largely w ritten by a liberal noble
w hose official duties placed him am ong those in high office in charge o f
econom ic developm en t W e read in this docum ent o f the pow erful advan
tages o f strengthening property rights: the m ore fully one is a proprietor,
the m ore one is m otivated to invest, thereby increasing yields. It is in the
public in terest that landow ners not be burdened with seigneurial paym ents.
On the oth er hand, seigneurial rights are them selves property. H ow ever,
no on e’s property claim s extend beyond the grave. A father, this cahier
g oes on, lacks the right “ to com m it his children to a sem i-servitu de.” T o
contract an agreem ent that on e’s heirs will pay a seigneurial right forev er
w ith no possibility o f redem ption is to agree to give away what belongs to
another and is th erefore invalid. A full understanding o f property rights m ust
indude oth ers’ rights and therefore a full resp ect for property requires an
indem nification option (A P 4:197). T h e claim that seigneurial rights are
property, then, w hile not fully acceptable w ithout certain qualifications, has
enough force that the com prom ise form ula o f indem nification, rather than
outright abolition, is in order.
N otions o f property w ere serviceable to defend the old ord er as w ell as
attack it;25 by giving due w eight to the property rights o f both th ose w ho
paid and th ose w ho w ere paid seigneurial rights, m oreover, on e appeared to
be led in the direction o f indem nification. All positions, then, could be— and
24. Robin, “Fief et seigneurie.” James Whitman has called attention to a significant current
among Old Regime legal theorists that resisted treating the seigneurial regime as a body of debts
among equals. See James Q. Whitman, “ ‘Les seigneurs descendent au rang de simples créanciers’:
Droit romain, droit féodal et Révolution,” Droits: Revue Française de ThéorieJuridique 17 (1993):
19-32.
25. To recall Chapter 2, the cahiers of the nobility are actually rather more likely to mount a
defense of property rights than the cahiers of the Third Estate (66% vs. 50%).
w ere— justified in term s o f property rights. N ot w ily w ere rationalized form s

o f agricultural practice being developed in part through the use o f m edieval
legal term inology to pressure recalcitrant peasant com m unities, but the
jurists o f the late eighteenth century w ere prone to see in seigneurial rights
a form o f private property rather than a m ere obstacle to the full develop
m ent o f what many m ight hold to be the quintessentially capitalist institution.
If the Revolution’s cham pions w ere fond o f the claim that the revolutionary
order m eant the entire destruction o f the feudal regim e, the detailed
intertwining o f the damned “feudal” and the sacralized “ property” w as very
tigh t The developm ent o f a rationale for detailed legislation in the country
side would be a very delicate problem .
Merlin Defines the Feudal Regime

The selection o f M erlin de Douai as head o f the National A ssem bly’s
com m ittee charged with drawing up such legislation w as sym ptom atic;
M erlin had made his reputation before the Revolution through his ingenuity
in the defense o f lords’ claim s against their peasants. M erlin, for exam ple,
gained legal recognition for one lord’s right to enlarge the roads through the
local communal lands and to com pel nearby peasant com m unities to pay the
w ages o f the road crew s.26 H is contributions to a m ajor manual on seigneurial
rights w ere, in the estim ate o f G eorges L efebvre,27 very rigorous in their
support o f seigneurial dom ination. His legal rigor notwithstanding, M erlin
saw the task confided him by the A ssem bly as fundam entally a political on e:
avoiding the hopeless alienation o f the lords on the one hand and o f the
peasants on the o th e r “ It is necessary to give the people a law w hose
ju stice will force into silence the egotistical feudatory w ho, for the last six
m onths, has been scream ing so indecently about spoliation, and a law w hose
wisdom m ay return to the cou rse o f duty the cultivator w ho has, for the
m om ent, strayed out o f resentm ent o f long oppression” (AP 1 1 :4 9 8 -9 9 ).
The very ch oice o f M erlin for such a role may have been intended to
reassure lords w ho w orried about the m eaning o f August 4: M erlin’s
rigorous mind would be applied to finding a set o f principles under w hich
August 4 would turn out not to have expropriated the lords. T h ose principles
would have to be found, for the claim that the “feudal regim e” had been
abolished could not very w ell be retracted— not if the National A ssem bly
w ere to hope for a pacified countryside and not if the National A ssem bly
w ere to continue to fulfill its ow n hopes o f breaking with a past for w hich
“ feudal” was becom ing a global summary.
N ow the intellectual task facing M erlin and his com m ittee w as how to
26. Georges Lefebvre, Lespaysans duNord, 155,158.

27. Ibid., 158.
keep the peasants paying the legitm ate claim s o f property ow ners (good )
and yet maintain the vision o f a decisive break with a feudal past (bad) when
the tw o w ere in practice and in eighteenth-century legal thought so closely
bound together. M erlin developed the distinction betw een those claim s o f
the lords that w ere founded on a violent usurpation and those deriving from
a freely consented con tra ct T he form er, the operational specification o f
“ feudal” for M erlin, w ere erf cou rse to be abolished (sin ce the “ entire feudal
regim e” was abolished, after all). T he latter, how ever, w ere property, and
not to b e touched w ithout proper com pensation.
T he possibility o f aefiusting the term s o f indem nification to m eet the
political needs o f the m om ent m ade this an especially tem pting option
indeed. If the rate w ere set sufficiently high so that no one could conceivably
pay, the National A ssem bly could adhere to its claim to have m ade peasant
em ancipation possible w ithout actually altering peasant burdens in the
slightest; if the rate w ere set ju st low enough so that paym ent w as
conceivable, then th ose w ho genuinely w ished the long-term elim ination o f
the droitsféodaux could see that goal realized with minimal em bitterm ent o f
the holders o f those rights (not to m ention the lucrative rew ards for
them selves to the extent that these very legislators w ere seigneurs); and,
should peasant resistance be greater than anticipated, the indem nification
rate could be set low er s till28 The very com plexity o f the indem nification
issue guaranteed considerable delay in im plem entation,29 which by itself
m ight have recom m ended it to many deputies w ho w ere uncertain as to how
to deal w ith rural France.
T he contractual versus the usurped: this rem arkable form ulation o f the
com m ittee on Feudal Rights had a double beauty. In the first place, since no
one could establish the consensual o r coerced nature o f any particular claim ,
the lords’ rights could be assigned to one or the oth er category as seem ed
expedient at the m om ent On one level, this may be seen as an attem pt to
recover what seem s to have been the initial goal o f the plan hatched in the
B reton Club on August 3: the prom ise o f abolition and the reality o f
indem nification at rates yet to be decided, but under appropriate political
conditions fixable at a rate unpayable by the peasantry. O nce viscount de
28. The history of the most striking precedent, if reflected upon by the deputies, would surely
have suggested the possibilities of fine-tuning within an indemnification framework. In 1762, the
duke of independent Savoy freed peasants to indemnify their lords for certain rights. After a period
of what was judged inadequate peasant response, the terms were reset in the peasants' favor in
1771. Noble and clerical protest led to further modification in 1778. (In 1790, the peasants of Savoy,
like their French neighbors, rebelled against the inadequate reforms.) See Max Bruchet, L'abolition
des droits seigneuriaux en Savoie (1761-1793) (Annecy; Hérisson, 1908); Jean Nicolas, La Révolution
française dans les Alpes: Dauphiné et Savoie, 1789-1799 (Toulouse: Privat, 1989), 103-10.
29. See the complaints of a spokesman for the Committee on Feudal Rights on the difficulties of
fixing the rates of indemnification: AP 12:387.
N oailles broke into the script and introduced the distinction betw een abolition
with and w ithout com pensation it was no longer possible to abolish nothing
w hatsoever; on ce the flood o f em otion, resignation, and calculation intro
duced the discussion o f all sorts o f other claim s, m ore genuine change in
w ho paid what to whom was unavoidable. M erlin’s com m ittee’s w ork, then,
may be read as a rem arkable attem pt to put m ost o f a cat back into a bag. If
the feudal regim e is lim ited, verbally, to what is already “ com pletely
abolished” then it follow s, d oes it not, that w hatever claim s on peasants
rem ain are not part o f the feudal regim e?
A lm ost from the beginning o f his assignm ent, then, M erlin placed the
total destruction o f the feudal regim e in the recen t past rather than the
indefinite future. In a statem ent defining the task o f the Com m ittee on
Feudal Rights on Septem ber 4, 1789, M erlin pondered the im m ediate
consequences o f term inating the feudal regim e. (F or exam ple, “ A s soon as
the feudal regim e is destroyed, d oes it follow that one ought no longer to
render foi et hommage [e tc .]? ” AP 8:575). The destruction was still located
in an indefinite future. But by February 8, M erlin placed it in the past30 and
therefore— and from then on— his speech es would focu s on the rationale for
indem nification and strategies to assure paym ent until that indem nification is
effected . If it isn’t feudal it m ust be “ property, ” to be resp ected and
collected . Thus, the M erlin p roject, by insisting upon the entire abolition o f
the feudal regim e as already accom plished, am ounted to a legitim ation o f all
other paym ents.
M erlin’s com m ittee recom m ended wiping out the surface rust o f feudalism
to reveal the shiny property not far beneath. M erlin repeated the hypnotic
refrain “ there are no m ore fiefs, therefore . . . ” many tim es— and the
conclusion that follow ed from the abolition o f fiefs, w as that paym ents due
lords w ere no longer feudal (the feudal regim e being entirely d estroyed) and
therefore m ust be paid (A P 11:500). Invoking the aw esom e overturning o f
the “ antique oak” o f the feudal regim e that had grow n over the kingdom ,
M erlin w ent on to describe “ the conceptual cen ter” o f the legislation: “ T he
feudal rights, by virtue o f the destruction o f the feudal regim e, have been
converted into sim ple ground rents” (4 P 11:498, 500). In M erlin’s reason
ing, th erefore, the very im age o f a decisive rupture becam e transform ed
into the justification for collectin g the sam e sum s from the sam e burdened
country people. A s his countrym en still say, “ Plus ça change, plus c ’e st la
m êm e ch ose. ”
It is p ossible, then, to read M erlin’s p roject o f M arch 1790 (and perhaps
the original intent o f the duke d’Aiguillon and his fellow s on August 4, 1789)
as effectin g the transform ation o f “ lords” into “ proprietors” by shifting the
30. Note that this coincides with the insurrectionary wave of December 1789-February 1790.
SeeAP 11:498-518.
juridical rationale for their claim s w ithout in any substantial w ay dim inishing
th ose claim s them selves. T his verbal sleight-of-hand w as not sim ply the
clever innovation o f M erlin, but w as rooted in im portant w ays in the
intellectual habits o f the ju rists o f the late eighteenth century. Such, in any
even t, is the interpretation o f these intellectual acts given by Régine
R obin.31 Studying som e o f the m ore significant prerevolutionary manuals o f
seigneurial rights (including on e o f which M erlin w as co-author), Rotan notes
the degree to w hich such manuals w ere already perm eated with “bou rgeois”
con cep ts. T h e seigneurial rights w ere con ceived as property; their acquisi
tion w as seen as “ contractual.” Rather than evok e, as a legitim ating con text,
an im age o f a property hierarchical w orld in which m en and their lords
en tered into relationships in which each filled appropriate obligations to the
oth er, with the nature o f th ose obligations depending on on e’s role within
the superior-subordinate pair, the eighteenth-century jurists had already
slipped into the language o f property legitim ately exchanged by freely
contracting juridical equals.
M erlin m erely m akes this reasoning explicit by superim posing upon the
distinction betw een the violently coerced ( = “usurped” ) and the contractual
( = “ paym ent for a con cession o f land” ) a secon d distinction m ade in the
term inology o f Roman law. M erlin distinguishes betw een “ personal rights”
and “ real righ ts.” Personal rights derive from a hierarchical relationship
am ong unequals; since they are rooted in the greater pow er o f the (m e over
the other, they are explicitly or im plicitly coerciv e. T h ey have their origins
in an era w hen sovereignty w as parceled out into feudal anarchy and are, in
the enlightened eighteenth century, w holly illegitim ate. On the oth er hand,
there are the “ real righ ts,” which d o not derive from the superior status o f
on e man ov er another, but are, in their origins, freely consented contractual
arrangem ents am ong juridical equals. A balance o f public purpose and private
property w as achieved by recognizing state appropriation o f property in
return for adequate com pensation, tacked on at the last m inute as the final
article o f the D eclaration o f the Rights o f Man and C itizen,32 adopted tw o
w eeks after the declarations on seigneurial rights. B y declaring the greater
part o f the seigneurial rights to be presum ptively within the “ contractual”
category, M erlin, in e ffe ct, im agines the social relations at the tim e the
rights originated to have perm itted a freely consented con tra ct33 A class o f
lords, w ho on ce m ight have proudly proclaim ed their personal superiority
31. Robin, “Fief et seigneurie.” See also Régine Robin, Histoire et linguistique (Paris: Armand
Colin, 1973), 181-83.
32. Georges Lefebvre, The Comingofthe French Revolution, 147.
33. If the feudal past carried a burden of anarchic violence for Merlin and many of his
contemporaries, one might well wonder why so many of the seigneurial rights are presumptively
contractual But no one demanded that Merlin produce a coherent picture of the political economy
of medieval landholding.
and on the basis o f that superior status defended their prerogatives, w ere
now redefined as m erely the juridical equals o f their peasants, w ho, having
freely consented in the past, m ust now be held to continue to pay in the
present, unless, o f cou rse, they paid adequate com pensation.
This line o f defen se o f seigneurial rights w as w idely taken up. A creative
effort to establish a contractual aspect to a claim on publicly displayed
d eferen ce, for exam ple, is found in a letter to a noble friend w ritten by
G rellet, deputy o f H aute-M arche, on June 2, 1790. (H e has ju st stopped
signing him self G rellet de Beauregard). H e com m ents that the seigneurial
claim to a fam ily bench in church “ cannot be preserved” if it is held to derive
from being a seigneur; it how ever, it can be m ade out that on e is a “ patron,”
“ it seem s to m e that [the benches] are presum ed to have been granted as
the p rice o f a con cession and b e n e fit” T he church bench w ould be redefined
from a sign o f the superiority o f one man over oth ers, now illegal, to an
ob ject acquired by con tra ct (“ This m otive is to m y ey es infinitely m ore
resp ectable.” ) But G rellet adds that he d oesn 't know if this reasoning
w ill w ork.34
This exam ple suggests the historically arbitrary character o f the assign
m ent o f specific rights to on e or the other category.35 “ H istorically’’ arbitrary
in that one presum es that rights are coerced or contractual w hen no p roof
one w ay or the oth er w as possible in m ost cases. T h e law recogn ized such
a gray area in principle: the presum ptive categorization o f som e rights could
be challenged in cou rt by allow ing on e party to have the right to produce
docum ents that in practice could only rarely be produced. W hat w as
historically arbitrary could be categorized in accord w ith political judgm en t
W e saw in Chapter 3 that the countryside show ed som e support for
indem nification o f periodic rentlike dues, and relatively little o r even no
support fo r indem nifying oth er rights. T he law o f M arch 1 5 -2 8 , 1790,
roughly parallels this pattem , suggesting that w hen M erlin proposed indem
nification for champart, say, there w as som e sen se o f at least the possibility
o f peasant acquiescence.
T h e arbitrary character also perm itted the m oving o f rights from on e
34. jean-Baptiste Grelet de Beauregard, “Lettres de Grellet de Beauregard,” Société dessciences

naturelles et archéologiques de la Creuse (1899): 84.
35. The décisions being taken by legislators on a national scale concerning broad classes of rights
were being replicated in miniature around the country as thousands of lords made political decisions
and intellectual distinctions in deciding precisely what to attempt to collect and what to abandon. In
the summer of 1790, the council that administered the vast holdings of the duke de Penthièvre, for
example, pondered an annual obligation of the village of Essay near Châteauvillain to make an annual
payment, a sumof twenty-three livres and one chicken. Out of some combination of legal scholarship
and political judgment, they decided that the chicken was “personal” and thereby abolished while
the “real” claimof cash was to be paid, pending indemnification; see Jean Duma, "Le Conseil du duc
de Penthièvre et le mouvement populaire (1789-1792),” injean Nicolas, ed., Mouvementspopulaires
et conscience sociale, XVIe-XIXe siècles (Paris: Maloine, 1985), 665.
category to the n e x t Thus su ccessive m om ents o f insurrection betw een

M arch 1790 and the spring o f 1792 led the assem bly to shift categories by
w ay o f accom m odation. T he law o f April 1 3 -2 0 , 1791, enum erated som e
forty rights to be abolished that w ere not specifically indicated in the original
classification (4 P 2 5 :4 -7 ). Finally, intellectual inconsistencies in even the
initial laws seem calibrated to m eet som e sen se o f what the countryside
m ight tolerate. Thus, im probably, mainmorte riele (“ real” m ainm orte) is
lum ped w ith the “ personal” rights and therefore abolished w ithout indemni
fication (as the peasants dem and) (4 P 12:173). Perhaps, but doubtfully, the
C om m ittee ju st tripped on the intellectual com plexity o f the task. But w e
m ay have even less doubt when w e consider the C om m ittee’s actions cm
seigneurial usurpations o f com m on lands. T he Com m ittee initially urged—
and the A ssem bly adopted— a m oratorium o f thirty years. U surpations that
took place further back w ere not annulled even though the central explicit
statem ent o f principles required the law to claim that oth er usurpations back
into the M iddle A ges w ere now to be undone. O f cou rse, as w e saw in the
previous chapter, all the revolutionary legislatures w ere politically skittish
about land ow nership issu es and tended to hunt for com prom ises (especially
if com prom ises could be slanted tow ard larger ow n ers). Thus all “ usurped”
rights w ere to be abolished even if usurped a thousand years b efore— unless
it w as the hot topic o f the com m ons that w as at issu e.36 T he abstract
rationale o f dividing rights into the violently usurped and the contractual w as
n ot, then, consistently practiced even on the conceptual level, quite apart
from its em pirically preposterou s character.
T h e dram atic alterations in the laws brought on by the w artim e m obiliza
tion in conjunction with continuing peasant disturbances (se e Chapter 8 )
radically altered the options facing peasant and lord. T h e series o f laws
enacted by the Legislative A ssem bly in spring and sum m er (especially June
18, August 20, and August 25 o f 1792), reversed the burden o f p r o o í N ow
the lords w ere in the situation o f having to prove the contractual nature o f
their claim s. (T he very few lords w ho m ight actually have an original
contract— the “ prim ordial title”— w ould have to con sider the probably fool
hardy act o f trying to sue a peasant com m unity before a revolutionary ju dge
in ord er to claim the sam e sorts o f rights his neighbor’s son s w ere fighting
to overturn in Belgium , Germ any, and Italy.) But the overarching legal
th eory w as still m aintained: that there w ere contractual and th ere w ere
coerced seigneurial claim s.
N ot until the law o f July 1 7 ,1 7 9 3 , did an even m ore radicalized C onvention
grant the abolition o f the entire structure when confronted w ith cou n terrevo-
36. These inconsistencies in legal reasoning are pointed to by Phäippe Sagnac and PiefTe Caron,
Les comités des droitsfiodaux et de législation et Fabolition du régime seigneurial (1789-1793) (Paris:
Imprimerie Nationale, 1907), xü-xü.
hition, although no longer facing dow n significant antiseigneurial actions.

And what o f the rationale for the law o f July 1793? The existing w ritten
record indicates no debate, nothing but a brief prelim inary m ention o f a law
in preparation on June 3 and again cm July 15. Was there another behind-
th e-scen es preparation as cm August 3, 1789? We know nothing but that
after several years o f public rhetoric saturated with M erlin’s distinctions,
the seigneurial rights w ere now to be throw n away; one cannot say
‘‘uncerem oniously thrown aw ay,” for the titles, when they existed, w ere to
be very cerem oniously burned. All seigneurial rights w ere now regarded as
violently obtained (and any purported evidence to the contrary w as to be
elim inated by fire .) We have som e hints that the lexical practices o f the
deputies, even when focu sed cm seigneurial rights rather than the broad
m eaning o f the Revolution, w ere overflow ing their ow n effort at a narrow
definition o f the feudal. T he preface to the law o f August 2 0 ,1 7 9 2 , spoke o f
the need to em ancipate property to assure “ the absolute independence o f
citizen s.”37 It w ent on to urge a speeding-up o f this em ancipation by easing
“ the indem nification o f form erly feudal rights.” B y im plication, at least som e
o f th ese rights that w ere not initially abolished outright w ere “ feudal” (until
they becam e “ form erly”). And on June 3 ,1 7 9 3 , a deputy called for com plet
ing “ the destruction o f la féodalité” (A P 6 6 :4 ), indicating, again, that not all
encom passed within the feudal had actually been destroyed by the acts o f
August 4 -1 1 , 1789. T he narrow definition, though prom oted w ith great
energy, w as failing even in the legislature, let alone the village.
And even after July 17, 1793, attem pts to control w ords failed to
control events. O ne telling sym ptom o f the im possible intellectual task, if
undertaken seriously, o f the initial plan to separate w ith clarity “ property”
from “ feudal rights” w as the storm o f protest against the legislated burning
o f the seigneurial records from holders o f what alm ost no one (excep t som e
southw estern sharecroppers?) denied w ere property claim s. T h ese very
sam e docum ents som etim es also contained the only valid record s o f the ex
lords’ claim s to re n t
Merlin’s Reasoning and Noble Ideology

M erlin’s reasoning may have appealed precisely because it system atized the
way the nobility w ere already inclined to defend the seigneurial rights. L et
us consider what the nobility did not do. Régine R obin's research on
seigneurial manuals depicts an aristocracy that has largely abandoned the
claim s o f G od’s immutable hierarchy as the basis for justification o f its
37. Sagnac and Caron, Les comités des droitsféodaux, 768.

holdings, as revealed in the language o f practitioners o f feudal law in the

eighteenth century. W e may review som e further evidence on this point
largely drawn from the cahiers o f the nobility. T h ere are at least three
significant elem ents that the cahiers reveal to us. T he nobility did not
exp ress a vision o f a profoundly hierarchical social totality, they did not
ground their social vision in divine sanction, and they did not maintain a
structure o f mutual support with the human bearers o f G od's w ord.
To elaborate each point in turn: first, w e find only the m ost minimal
interest in retaining any o f the hierarchical structure o f “feudalism .'’ W hen
M erlin contended that som ething besides fiefs w as the object, at that
m om ent, o f discussions o f “ the feudal regim e,” the complexumfeudale that
he borrow ed from Dumoulin is not som ething broader than the structure o f
fiefs and the relations o f lord and vassal (in the original sen se o f that term )
but which includes those fiefs and those social relationships. M erlin’s
complexumfeudale turns out to be not so m uch an expansion o f a con cept to
cover m ore than the fiefs, but som ething quite different than the w orld o f
the fiefs altogether.
T he fiefs them selves, in fact, can easily be abolished because no one,
including the nobility, cares any m ore. M ore generally, the cahiers display
very little concern over those rights that involve form al recognition o f one’s
location within a netw ork conceived o f as linking m en unequal in status. T he
nobility that thus presents itself in the cahiers has a sen se o f the nobility-
com m oner divide as a significant m arker to be retained; but internally the
nobility is unstructured. N ot many noble cahiers m ake this claim explicitly,
but their alm ost total failure to m ention the minutiae o f status gradations
show the degree to which the nobility o f present and future are con ceived
as equal am ong them selves, if perhaps superior collectively to the Third
E state (see Chapter 3, p. 61).
Although noble cahiers retain the language o f devotion to the king, it is
striking how little this language has to d o w ith a feudal hierarchy. T hey still
speak o f their resp ect, gratitude, love, fidelity, devotion, attachm ent, and
obedience to their king and the king to som e exten t still preserves the
m edieval attributes o f “ goodness” and, to a lesser extent, “ prudence.”
N onetheless, the king is practically never located at the apex o f a feudal
hierarchy.38 T he nobility o f St. M ihiel are unusual in recognizing Louis “ in
his quality as suzerain” but hardly honor him for it because he is thereby
im plicated in the extortion to which all local p ossessors o f fiefs are subject
38. Medieval French kings were conventionally ascribed “three qualities winch were those of
God himself: bonitas, sapientia, and potentia.” Note that the third member of this particular
trinity—power—is almost wholly missing in the cahiers’ invocation of Louis XVL See Bernard
Guénée, States and Rulers in Later Medieval Europe (Oxford: Basfl Blackwell, 1988), 71; Shapiro
and Markoff, Revolutionary Demands: A Content Analysis of the Cakiers de Dolianets of 1789
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), chap. 19.
(A P 2:236). If a m inuscule num ber o f cahiers address him as seigneur; an

equal num ber use a m uch new er m odel o f authority, the citizen-king.39 And
perhaps the m arquis de F errières expressed what others felt when he
found, as com pensation for social dem ocratization, that at least others w ould
no longer so easily be able to lode down on him .40
Second, the claim that social order rested on divine warrant, had been
supplanted to a large extent in the cahiers o f Third E state and nobility alike
by argum ents from history or functional utility.41 T he Third E state o f
N em ours, for exam ple, cham pioned indem nification by invoking “ natural
law ,” that am biguous w ay-station betw een G od and a desanctified w orld:
natural law, the text suggests, requires that debtors be able to pay o ff their
debts (and therefore perpetual paym ents are im proper). But this natural-
law argum ent is alm ost subm erged by utilitarian appeals to the increase in
agricultural yields sure to follow on term ination o f seigneurial paym ents (4 P
4:197). The particular dangers o f argum ents from history and utility w ere,
to be sure, that others m ight have their ow n interpretations o f that history
and their ow n evaluations o f that utility.
Third and finally, there was a w eakening, if not a breakdow n, in the lord-
church nexus. T he sym bolization o f the interpenetration o f the religious
realm with immutable social hierarchy m anifest in such practices as the
lord’s church-bench and the m onasteries’ claim to seigneurial rights had long
helped w eave the sen se o f divine warrant into the seigneurial fabric. But the
first tw o orders w ere far from standing shoulder to shoulder in their cahiers
and beyond on defen se o f each others’ rights. T he cahiers reveal a certain
lack o f mutual support betw een the first tw o orders. T he noble cahiers do
not defend peasant paym ents to clerics, for exam ple (see Table 3 .1 ). And
church prelates on the night o f August 4 w ere m ore than willing to sacrifice
the pleasures o f lay seigneurs. The m arquis de F errières w ell expressed
39. Nobility of Clermont-Ferrand: “A citizen King invites us to come. . . and work to refrain the
abuses” (AP 2:766).
40. Ferrières, reflecting wistfully to his sister on August 10,1789, on the losses of the nobility,
finds some consolation in a more democratic climate: “aDin all, I prefer that the man in the street
think he’s my equal than to see a Great Lord think me his inferior and treat me like those he pays
and feeds”; see Charies-ESe de Ferrières, Correspondance médite (1789, 1790, 1791) (Paris:
Armand Cofin, 1932), 120.
41. I will not comment here on the cahiers of the dergy, which, unfortunately for the discussion
at hand, were not included in the Shapiro-Markoff cahiers data archive. Those who controlled the
periodic assemblies of the clergy of France appear to have maintained a consistent image of a
linkage of throne andaltar throughout the century; it is worthaskingwhether the clergy’s assemblies
in 1789, when the hierarchy was so profoundly challenged, maintained the sacred connection beyond
the weakened forms it retains in the noble and Third Estate texts. See Michel Péronnet, “La
théorie de l’ordre public exposée par les assemblées du clergé: Le trône et l’autel (seconde moitié
du XVÜIe siècle),” in Jean Nicolas, ed., Mouvements populaires et conscience sociale, XVle-XIXe
siècles (Paris: Maloine, 1985), 625-34.
the indifference with which a portion o f the nobility regarded the problem s
o f church in revolution. H e supported the nationalization o f church land o f
N ovem ber 2, 1789; castigated as intolerant and fanatic those priests who
treated the juring clergy with disdain; and found the clergy to be responsible
for m uch o f the conflict o f the R evolution.42 (T o be sure, the staunch
Catholicism o f other nobles and the noble origins o f the clerical hierarchy
provided an im portant nucleus o f persons and an ideological coloration to the
counterrevolution. J43
Legislators Maintain a Broad

Definition and a Narrow One; Peasants
Misunderstand
The developing tendency o f the defenders o f seigneurial rights to esch ew
religious linkages, disdain a feudal hierarchy, and adopt a contractual view
o f legitim ation provided only the w eakest o f buttresses against the onslaught
o f those determ ined on rem oving im pedim ents to progress in the nam e o f
precisely the sam e principles o f unencum bered property rights. It did,
how ever, also furnish the possibility o f the particular illusionary legislative
strategy o f M erlin: to denounce rights grounded in the hierarchical principles
now sloughed o ff and therefore to regard what w as left— nam ely, m ost o f
what peasants directly paid lords— as unassailable.
In a rem arkable statem ent to the National A ssem bly on June 15, 1791—
(d oes the tim ing respond to the spurt o f unrest in that m onth? see Table
6 .3 ), M erlin insisted on the m oral basis for enforcing seigneurial paym ents.
He began by celebrating the abolition o f the feudal regim e, understood as
rights o f one person over another. But rights arising from con cession s o f
land that are subsum ed under “ the sacred and inviolable rights o f property”
are a different m atter entirely. The legislators quite naturally expected that
rural peace would have been restored. But peasant disturbances have
continued, M erlin acknow ledged, and for tw o reasons. T he first is that
“enem ies o f the Revolution” have m isled the country people into disorder.
And secon d, som e local adm inistrators responsible for National P roperty
have lacked the courage to go on collectin g seigneurial rights and thereby
have spread a spirit o f insubordination. M erlin w ent on to describe the
proper procedure for contesting a seigneurial claim that had not, perhaps,
42. See Auhrd’s introduction to Ferrières, Correspondance.

43. See Timothy Tackett, Becoming a Revolutionary: The Deputies of the French National
Assembly and the Emergence ofa Revolutionary Culture (1789-1790) (Princeton: Princeton Univer
sity Press, 1996), on the religious aspect of the National Assembly's right
been property understood “ although very d e a r." (This w as follow ed by a

score o f very dense paragraphs that it is difficult to believe could have been
grasped by a listener, particularly on a warm June day in a stuffy hall with
p oor a cou stics.) H e expressed the b elief that the proper understanding o f
the law “ will bring all difficulty to an en d .” If that fails, how ever, one m ust
look to the judiciary, the local adm inistrations, the National Guard, and the
arm y. But force “ shall surely be rarely necessary” for the citizens o f the
countryside shall appreciate the benefits o f the Revolution “ and they shall all
feel since they have becom e the equals o f their form er lords in rights, that
these form er lords, by that fact alone, m ust peacefully eqjoy their proper
ties, ju st like them selves” (4 P 2 7 :2 3 8 -4 2 ).
M erlin is a schoolm aster here: he hopes and exp ects that the peasants
can be taught to see their errors. T hey have m isunderstood the law, not
having grasped the distinction betw een personal and real rights. T h ey have
not seen the benefits the Revolution has given them . T h ey have not seen
the ju stice in the property rights o f form er lords. But the schoolm aster can
be stem . Pointing out the coercive capacities that can be m arshaled, he
exp ects that the people o f the countryside “ will not cause the National
A ssem bly to regret the benefits” it has accorded them ; even those w ho do
not appreciate the ju stice o f the new law or w ho sim ply m isunderstand it,
can understand the pointlessness o f resistance and “will hurry” to pay “what
they cannot esca p e.” M erlin thus grants the villagers the capacity to
understand force (4 P 27:242).
In the legislative rhetoric the radical break in history effected by the rapid
and total destruction o f an institution so central that it penetrated all the
nooks and crannies o f the national existen ce coexisted with the unending
efforts at restricting change and lim iting the threat from below . T he
em otional exaltation o f overthrow ing history coexisted w ith carefully
thought-out m easures o f dam age control.
What coexisted for legislators could be experienced as contradictory for
peasants. If continuing peasant insurrection seem ed, to puzzled legislators,
a sign o f incom prehension, ingratitude, or “ sedition,” peasants could find
the legislation equally baffling and equally in need o f explanation. On
D ecem ber 7, 1790, anxious officials in Cahors w rote to the A ssem bly that
extensive peasant turbulence has been in considerable m easure provoked
by the claim that the d ecrees on seigneurial rights w ere fake: they w ere
not, so it w as rum ored locally, the real acts o f the National A ssem bly, but
fraudulent versions put out by the form er lords (4 P 21:457). A very
thorough report on that situation put out by tw o investigators sent by the
A ssem bly to explain the local disturbances never directly asked w hy such a
claim m ight seem plausible in the countryside.44
44. Jacques Godard and Léonard Robin, RapportdeMessieursJ. GodardetL. Robin, commissaires
In February 1790 M erlin had explained how total w as the break w ith the
past: “ M essieurs, in destroying the feudal regim e; in overturning, to use a
w ell-know n expression o f M ontesquieu, this antique oak w hose branches
covered the entire surface o f the French em pire w hile its unknown roots
reach back into the custom s and governm ent o f the barbarians who expelled
the Romans from G aul . . . You have taken on a great task” (A P 11:498).
But three insurrection-filled years later Isoré com m ented on the floor o f the
Convention that the Revolution had not destroyed the tree o f feudalism , but
only pruned it (A P 68:19).
O ne w ay o f describing the com prom ise o f M arch 1790, then, w as as an
arrangem ent in which the lords w ould either keep m ost o f their claim s on
direct paym ents (because the peasants couldn’t pay back at the high rates
and stringent m odalities), now justified in term s o f the new ideals o f
property, or, som etim es, receive generous financial returns for their aboli
tion. T he peasants w ere to get the generous know ledge that what they
w ere paying was now consented by them rather than coerced from them :
now they w ere to pay and like it And how disappointing that they didn’t
seem to like it!
T he tone o f som e o f the subsequent angry, hurt, frustrated, and surprised
legislators discovering that country people w ere not m ore prone to pay
legitim ate property claim s than they had been to make the sam e paym ents
when they w ere illegitim ate and feudal was surely som etim es put on, but
som etim es it appears to be genuine puzzlem ent A t least som e legislators
seem ed to really think this plan would w ork. It is as if the delegates felt that
renam ing things truly constituted a change in their essen ces, as if w ords
had m agical properties.45 A t least one deputy saw it that w ay from the sta rt
In describing, tw o days later, the plan w orked out on August 3 , P arisot tells
us that rather than take the fruitless route o f introducing ju st another
m otion, a group o f about one hundred decided “ to use a kind o f m agic.”46
L et us recall how rapidly the insurrections w ere dropping off, ju st as soon
as the declaration w as issued (see Fig. 8 .1 ). Would not such an apparent
rew ard fo r their efforts be experienced by som e legislators as a validation
o f the efficacy o f their w ords?
civils, envoyéspar le roi, dans le département de Lot, en exécution du décretde FAssemblée Nationale,
du 13 décembre, 1790 (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1791).
45. Consider, for example, Grégoire’s comment on Us own coining of “vandalism” (“I created
the word to kill the thing") or the proposal of a deputy in the Thermidorean Convention “to exdude
the word ‘revolutionary’ from the language,” killing the thing, one might say, by uncreating the
word. And sometimes the thing might cause the word. Stanislas de Clermont-Tbnnerre told the
National Assembly: "Everything is new for us. We are heading towards regeneration and have
created words to express new ideas.” See Henri Grégoire, Mémoires (Paris: A. Dupont, 1837),
1:346; Ferdinand Brunot, Histoire de la langue française de ses origines à nos jours, voL 9, La
Révolution et FEmpire (Paris: Armand Cohn, 1967), part 2, 656; AP 9:603.
46. Quoted in Lefebvre, The Comingofthe French Revolution, 136.
W e need also to see the degree to which, in the heightened atm osphere
o f 1789, intellectuals in public life in France found pow er in w ords; indeed,
w ere drunk on w ords.47 T h ere are all the neologism s o f the revolutionary
era: the im ports, generally from England (like “ com m ons”), the retrieving
o f w ords from classical educations and, dusting them o ff for application to
the struggles o f the hour (like “ dem ocrat” o r “ agrarian law” ), the infusion o f
richer m eanings into initially lim ited term s (like “revolution” ), the m etaphors
used for the unprecedented (like “ left” and “ right” ). Philippe R oger has
show n how w ord-obsessed both revolutionaries and counterrevolutionaries
w ere. A s revolutionaries coined new term s, counterrevolutionaries, pion
eering deconstructionists, issued debunking dictionaries.48 Eventually the
term s for space and tim e w ere changed (the m etric system , the revolution
ary toponom y, the new calendar). And if altering the language o f the French
was difficult enough, other languages w ere to be seen as beyond reform ; as
B arère w as to put it in a m uch-dted speech: “federalism and superstition
speak B reton; em igration and hatred for the Republic speak Germ an;
counterrevolution speaks Italian and fanaticism speaks Basque” (A P
83:715).
The Revolution w as many things and one o f them w as, as Philippe R oger
observes, a logom achy, a war about w ords. Talleyrand spoke for many
when he characterized the National A ssem bly “ that surely know s . . . the
pow er o f the w ord and that know s the extent to which w ords are the stuff
o f em pire or rather how m uch effect they have upon ideas and through ideas
upon habits.”49 In such a logogen etic view o f social transform ation, to define
feudalism is to control human action.50 And, th erefore, peasants w ho rebel
are m ostly diagnosed as not understanding. A s chair o f the Com m ittee on
R eports, charged w ith keeping track o f sedition, G régoire reported som e
five causes o f the peasant risings o f w inter 178 9-90 in Brittany and the
Southw est, first and forem ost o f which w as “ ignorance o f the language” (A P
11:536). H e proposed m obilizing the parish priesthood in an instructional
cam paign. Investigators G odard and Robin, sent to the Southw est, w ere
prepared from the beginning to se e rural resistance as com posed o f a small
num ber o f “ instigators” to be dealt with by force and a m uch larger num ber
47. The starting point for study of revolutionary language is stiD Bnmot, Histoire de la langue
française.
48. Philippe Roger, “Dictionnaire contre Révolution”; "La langue révolutionnaire au tribunal des
écrivains,” in R. Campagnob, ed., Robespierre A Co. (Bologna: CLUEB, 1988), 1:175-93; "Le
débat sur la langue révolutionnaire,’ ” inJean-Claude Bonnet, La Carmagnole des muses: L’homme
de lettres et Tartiste dans la Révolution (Paris: Armand Colin, 1988), 157-84; Roger Bamy, “Les
mots et les choses chez les hommes de la Révolution française,” LaPenste, no. 202 (1978): 96-115.
49. Quoted in Roger, "La langue révolutionnaire,” 160-61.
50. A novelist would be reproached for straining credibility if he invented a revolutionary elite,
ready to see words controlling things, who, searching for a chief architect of "a kind of magic,”
came up with someone named Merlin as its master magician.
o f the "m isted" w ho need only proper instruction.51 T h ie to their view s o f

peasants errant by ignorance, G odard and Robin reported any num ber o f
incidents w here they instructed peasants on their responsibilities, on the
m eaning o f the law, (Hi thé benefits o f the Revolution. T he peasants, in their
report, invariably w ere grateful for the civics lesson s thus offered them .
Like many other teachers, G odard and Robin don’t inquire w hether their
pupils m ight be buttering them up by helping them see them selves as
successful instructors. Rabusson-Lam othe, a deputy to the Legislative
A ssem bly from Puy-de-D ôm e, com m ented on subsistence disturbances
during the insurrectionary w ave o f w inter 1792 that the only solution to
popular disturbance w as patient education “ that m ay in tim e show the m isled
their true in terests.”52 For his part, M erlin generally sees the failure to
com ply with his carefully crafted edicts as m isunderstandings. C ontrol over
w ords is central to the legislators’ conception o f control over d eed s.53 S o
M erlin is puzzled as to w hy the peasants’ deeds don’t accord w ith the
legislators’ w ords. A fundam entally pedagogic stance w as also em bodied in
La Feuille Villageoise, the Revolution’s Parisian-authored new spaper that
aim ed, highly unusually, at a peasant audience, and w hose editorial com m it
tee included a deputy to the National A ssem bly from N îm es, Rabaut Saint-
Etienne. In 1791, a “ N otice to all subscribers” offered the observation that
“ village disorders have hardly any origin other than ignorance.”54 E ven the
king could attribute rural disturbances to the m isled (A P 1 1 :4 3 0 -3 1 ).
The legislators on August 4 and on any num ber o f other occasion s felt
they w ere making history at the m om ent they acted. We have here som e
sen se o f the pow er o f w ords to be m ore than w ords. C onsider the contention
o f B oissy d’Anglas in the Convention: "T o dictate the destiny o f the w orld,
you need only w ill. You are the creators oí a new w orld: say that there shall
51. Godard and Robin, Rapport, for example, 13 (and passim).

52. Antoine Rabusson-Lamothe, Lettres sur FAssemblée Législative (1791-1792) (Paris: Aubry,
1870), 115.
53. One wonders to what degree this attribution of power to language is rooted mthe intelectual
culture of the eighteenth century and to what degree in the specific context of the revolutionary
legislatures where a large number of people met in a vast chamber, with poor acoustics, for long
hours. Only a master of words could get any attention at aOand in the unsettled turmoil oí 1789 and
beyond, among the revolutionary elites, words were power. Memoirs of prominent revolutionaries
are full of self-presentations (and of remembrances of others) in which verbal brilliance plays a great
role. "When so-and-so said this, how rich, witty, pointed was my reply” is a prominent theme in
these texts.
54. Béatrice Didier “La Feuile Villageoise: Un dialogue Paris-Province pendant la Révolution,”
in Robert Chagny, edL, Aux originesprovinciales de la Révolution (Grenoble: Presses Universitaires
de Grenoble, 1990), 267-78. For more on this newspaper, see Melvin Edelstein, La Ftuüle
Villageoise. Communication et information dans les régions rurales pendant la Révolution (Paris:
Commission dHistoire Economique et Sociale de la Révolution, 1977).
be light and there shall be light.”5 56 T he deputies could create “ the feudal
5
regim e” : it was in their pow er to con ceive o f a set o f institutions they
believed they had destroyed and to thereby experience the Revolution as
creating the w holly new . T h ey could not, how ever, so easily create the
experience o f the people o f the French countryside. T he feudal regim e o f
the peasants w as not “ the feudal regim e” that was “ abolished in its entirety”
betw een August 4 and August 11. T he deputies could invent w ords but they
couldn’t invent the country people (although they could invent “ the people”
as w ell as “ the brigands,” “ the peasant id iots,” “ the fanatics” ). Insurrection
ary peasants w ho refused to be invented and insurrectionary Parisians w ho
kept shaking up the legislatures w ere recalcitrant realities to which the
legislature ultim ately adapted by going m uch farther than it initially planned.
Monarchy
One o f the central dram as o f the Revolution’s early years w as the unraveling
o f the arrangem ent that institutionally placed an elected legislature side by
side w ith a hereditary m onarch. Ideologically there w as a tension betw een
finding the fount o f legitim ate authority in popular sovereignty and nonethe
less retaining a place in public life for a man w hose ow n claim s to authority
had h eretofore rested on divine sanction. H istorians have tended, recently,
to em phasize the elem ents in the revolutionaries’ outlook that m ade stable
com prom ise unlikely: in the transference o f a sen se o f sovereignty from
king to assem bly, the new political order was from the beginning latently
republican, particularly as m onarchical political culture had accustom ed
participants to speak o f sovereignty as unshared:56 from a m onarch w ho
fully em bodies sovereignty to an assem bly that d oes so w as a less radical
transition than any notion o f institutional com prom ise and negotiation. T he
hope o f balancing the pow er o f the king and the rights o f the nation “by a
ju st equilibrium ” 57 would have required enorm ous care and forebearance on
both sides. Within such a structure, Louis refused to dutifully play his part
and ultim ately provoked his rem oval and death. W hen w e look a bit m ore
closely at the actions o f the king that intensified legislative ill-w ill, w e find
that one o f the initial difficulties was over the fate o f seigneurial rights. Just
55. Quoted in Mona Ozouf, "La Révolution française et l’idée de l’homme nouveau,” in Cohn
Lucas, ed.. TheFrench Revolution and the Creation ofModemPolitical Culture, voL 2, ThePolitical
Culture oftheFrench Revolution (New York: Pergamon Press, 1988), 220.
56. This is a common enough phrase in the cahiers. See, for example, the nobles of Etain,
AP 2:214.
57. Third Estate of Cahors, AP 5:409.
as the night o f August 4 led to tensions with Rhenish princes, which in turn
becam e an opportunity for interstate tension to be couched in term s o f the
opposition o f the Revolution to feudalism , the falling-out o f king and legisla
ture also cam e to align Louis with the defenders o f the feudal regim e.
T h ere is little that was overtly antim onarchical at the on set o f revolution.
T h e assem blies in large num bers spoke o f their resp ect, gratitude, and love
for their paternal king and in som ew hat sm aller num bers o f their fidelity,
devotion, attachm ent, and obedience to their ju st and benevolent m onarch.“
A substantial num ber o f noble and Third E state cahiers still described the
king as “ sacred” (although (m e may w ell w onder what they meant by this).
D esired change w as presented as happening together with the king, under
his auspices or through his agency. For som e assem blies, indeed, the
E states-G eneral w as described as a vehicle for bringing the French, through
representatives, into contact with the sovereign w hose personal healing
touch w as now to “ rem edy the ills o f the kingdom and sooth e the oppressed
class. Well into the fall, the lively press was associating a beneficent and
paternal king with the renew al o f France, although after the O ctober days,
a few journalists, especially cm the right, began to see king and Revolution
as op p osed .560
9
5
8
T h ose w ho hoped to bring about change together with the king could
draw upon current understandings o f the trajectory o f French history as w ell
as recen t events in bolstering an im age o f a m onarchy in tandem w ith a
reform ed seigneurialism . To begin w ith, many w riters on the history o f the
m onarchy for the past half-century had counterposed that m onarchy to an
earlier epoch o f savage feudalism that had been brought under control by
the im position o f state discipline.61 Louis XVI, in particular, w as associated
58. The noble deputy count Beugnot, whose memoirs have a number of interesting observations
on the drafting of the cahiers of his bailliage, quotes a very exceptional parish cahier that he turned
over to the relevant authorities for criminal prosecution: ‘‘We give our deputies power to ask the
lord-king’s consent to the preceding demands; and should he grant it, to thank him, but should he
refuse, to unking him." See Jean-Claude de Beugnot, Mémoires du Comte Beugnot, 1779-1815
(Paris: Hachette, 1959), 94.
59. Third Estate, CharoOes, AP 2:618. On the long in the cahiers see Shapiro and Markoff,
RevolutionaryDemands, chap. 19.
60. Labrosse and Rétat, Naissancedujournal révolutiomtaire, 253-56. The history of the vitriohc
antiroyalist campaign that developed in part of the popular press is imperfectly known, but does not
seem noticeable earlier than the winter of 1791. See Oitri Elyada, “La représentation populaire
de l’image royale avant Vkreimes,” Annales Historiques de la Révolution Française, no. 297
(1994): 527-46.
61. See, for example, the jurist Henrion de Panse/s portrayal of past violence and usurpation
later tamed by the monarchy; ‘‘Eloge du DumouKn” in Pieire-Paul-Nicolas Henrion de Pansey, ed.,
Traité des fiefs de Dumoulin analysé et conféré avec les autres feudistes (Paris: Vhlade, 1773), esp.
7-8. Indeed, one may see much history-writing from as far back as the sixteenth century as imbued
with a monarchical triumphalism that condemned the anarchic, feudal past We saw in Chapter 4 that
the king was not associated with seigneurialism for the authors of the cahiers.
w ith tw o significant reform efforts. In 1779, apparently responding to a

vigorous cam paign against serfdom , the king abolished mainmorte on his
ow n dom ains.62 The pream ble o f the royal d ecree appealed to a com m on
humanity: “ w e have not been able to see w ithout pain the rem aining
elem ents o f servitude that continue in several o f our provinces; w e have
been affected by considering that a great num ber o f our subjects, servilely
attached to the land, are regarded as constituting a part o f the land and, so
to speak, as confounded with i t ” M oving from the language o f sentim ent to
the language o f proper procedure: the royal d ecree proclaim ed a resp ect for
property that forbade a national abolition w ithout com pensation w hile assert
ing an absence o f funds for such com pensation. The king, th erefore,
expressed the hope that oth er lords would voluntarily follow his exam ple.63
N ot m uch resulted from the initiative.64 The second area o f royal anti-
seigneurial action w as in the judicial realm as part o f the tw o great anti-
parlem entary reform packages o f the late Old Regim e. The M aupeou
program o f 1771 w as in part directed at increasing the efficacy w ith w hich
the courts pursued criminal m atters by rem oving those m atters from
seigneurial to royal cou rts, if necessary, m ore expeditiously than in the
p a st65 T he Lam oignon m easures o f 1788 w ent further still in perm itting
either party to civil litigation to insist on a hearing before a royal c o u r t66
Small w onder, then, that discussions o f the king are not associated in the
cahiers with the seigneurial regim e (see Chapter 4, p. 162).
Antiseigneurial forces might optim istically read such actions as indicating
the possibility o f royal support for m ore w ide-ranging m easures, particularly
if indem nification w as at the cen ter o f any plan. T h ose m oved by the
pream ble to the lim ited em ancipation edict o f 177967 m ight hope for what
the beneficent king could do now that revolutionary forces had unfettered
him from the hold o f a retrograde aristocracy. And com m itted royalists,
62. Alphonse Aubrd, La Révolution française et le régimeféodal (Paris: Alcan, 1919), 5-36; F.-
A. Isambert, Recueil général des anciennes lois françaises depuis tan 420 jusqu'à la Révolution de
1789 (Paris: Gregg Press, 1966), 26:139-42 (August 1779). At virtually the onset of revolution,
Henrion de Pansey hadnothing but enthusiasmfor the king’s emancipatory actions; see Dissertations
féodales: Thnti dupouvoir municipalet des biens communaux (Barrois, 1789), 2:185.
63. The king would not "buy back this right from the lords” because of “the regard we have
always had for the laws of property that we consider the most secure foundation for order and
justice”; see Jacques Necker, Oeuvres complètes (Paris: Iteuttel and WflrU, 1820), 3:492.
64. MiDot, Le régimeféodal en Franche-Comté au XVHIe siècle (Besançon: MiUot Frères, 1937).
65. Jules Fbmmermont, Le ChancelierMaupeou et lesparlements (Paris: Picard, 1883), 279, 281.
66. Jacques-Henri Bataillon, Les justices seigneuriales du bailliage de Pontoise à lafin de tAncien
Régime (Paris: Sirey, 1942), 161-65; Isambert, Recueil des anciennes lois, 29:541-42 (May 8,
1788). The relevant edict insisted that the lord's courts were property and therefore not to
be abolished.
67. At least one diarist was so moved. The abbé de Wri thought the preamble "more touching"
than poetry. But Wri also noted how few were the royal serfs who would actually be helped. See
Joseph Alphonse de Wri, Journalde tabbé de Wfri (Paris: Tallandier, 1928-30), 2:238.
regardless o f their specific positions (Hi the seigneurial regim e, m ight hope
to enlist the king on the side o f— and at least nom inally at the head
o f— the Revolution. The notion o f an antifeudal king could draw sustenance,
m oreover, from the intransigent resistance to royal policy o f the Besançon
Parlem ent, which p rotected serfdom in Franche-C om té to the extent o f
withholding registration o f the royal reform s— and thereby opposing em anci
pation even on royal estates— until forced to do so in the crisis o f 1788.® In
this confrontation, the target o f the defenders o f feudalism w as royal policy.
A m ore pessim istic reading o f the m onarch’s behavior m ight note that on
the m ost detested aspect o f seigneuriaüsm , serfdom , the king w as not
prepared to force anybody to em ancipate anyone from virtually anything6 69
8
and that property rights, which in the king’s view covered the seigneurial
regim e, w ere the highest priority. This latter elem ent w as clearly reiterated
by the king on June 23, 1789.70
It w as by no m eans strange, then, that a noble o f the monarchien group,
the count de Lally-Tolendal, su cceeded, tow ard the end o f the night erf
August 4, in securing the king’s association with the evening’s drama in the
form o f a com m em orative m edal and a Te Deum honoring Louis “the
R estorer o f L iberty.” 71 B oth proponents and opponents o f the even ts o f
August 4 could lay claim to one or another dubious statem ent o f Louis’s
actual reaction. In one rather unlikely account, the duke de Liancourt left
the session to inform his king and received a supportive statem ent from
him ;72 but there is also a letter o f uncertain authenticity, that Louis m ay
have sent on August 5, in which he adamantly refu ses to consent to the
spoliation o f “ m y clergy, m y nobility.” 73
68. MiBot, Le régimeféodal en Franche-Comté, 138 et seq.

69. In the antiserfdom decree, the right of “pursuit,’’ under which the possessions of a serf who
had left could be seized by the lord, was, exceptionally, abolished throughout the kingdom for al
serfs who had established a domicile. In Necker’s recommendation to the king, he advised Louis
not to worry about property issues in this case because the right of pursuit was “truly revolting."
Louis's decree did manage to invoke property, nonetheless, by stressing the defense of the goods
of serfs (Necker, Oeuvres, 3:490, 494, 496).
70. “All properties are to be continually respected and his Maiesty understands expressly under
the name of property the tithes, cens, rentes, seigneurial rights and duties and, generaly, al the
rights and prerogatives, whether income-producing or honorific, that are attached to fiefs and
lands."See Philippe-Joseph-Benjamin Bûchez and P.-C. itoux, Histoireparlementairedela Révoiutiom
/ranease (Paris: Paulin, 1834), 2:17.
71. Dophime-Gérard Lally-Tolendal, Mémoire de M. le comte de Lalfy-Tblendal, ou seconde lettre
à ses commetans (Paris: n.p., 1790), 1:112-13. Many deputies were quite pleased at associating the
king with these measures as shown by cries of “vive le roi” or expressions of satisfaction in
their correspondance; see Ferrières, Correspondance, 115; François-Joseph Boucherie, Lettres de
François-Joseph Bouchette (1735-1810): Avocat à Bergues. Membre de (Assemblée Constituante
(Paris: Champion, 1909), 241-42.
72. Kessel, La nuit du 4 août, 173-74.
73. Bûchez and Roux, Histoire parlementaire, 2:248.
B y early August, how ever, many had already discovered that their
Revolution w as being m ade against the king, not with him. The form ation o f
the National A ssem bly defied the king as w ell as the aristocracy; the problem
about suppressing peasant insurrection with force, for som e on the left, w as
not so m uch that it would fail but that organizing such force m ight lead the
king to m ove against them selves. The m onths ahead w ere to make d ea r
that Louis would do what he could to oppose the resolutions o f August
4 -1 1 ; he opposed them in such a way that a contentious procedural issue
over the pow ers o f the king in the new Constitution being w ritten and the
antifeudal package becam e yoked together. T he bitterly debated constitu
tional question w as w hether the king w as to be invested with an absolute
v eto over legislative enactm ents, a suspensive v eto that could delay legisla
tion but could, in turn, b e overridden or no v e to .74 A t stake w ere varying
theories o f w here sovereignty w as lodged. G iving this question added
urgency was the im m ediate problem o f what veto, if any, the king was to
have over the Constitution itself and over quasi-constitutional legislation
such as the enactm ents o f August 4 -1 1 appeared to be. T he way in which
the issue o f the role o f the king in the new order and the specific issues
surrounding the abolition o f feudalism becam e conflated w as around the
question o f what role, if any, was Louis to play in the enactm ents o f early
A u gu st Was his approval needed for these m easures to becom e law? T h ese
questions w ere p osed as early as the debates on August 6, when a clerical
deputy insisted that abolishing the tithe would be illegitim ate w ithout royal
concurrence (A P 8:353). Had Louis actually supported the m easures, no
doubt som e painless subterfuge could have been found under which those
w ho held his approval necessary could feel he had given it and those w ho
held his approval unnecessary could ignore it. But Louis’s tactic was to give
w hatever minimal assent could be gotten away w ith: to offer com m ents on
the legislation when asked for approval, to offer to publish the d ecree
w ithout authorizing its execution, to have it printed but not dissem inated,
e tc .75 Rather than go along w ith the enthusiasm with which, cm August 4,
the National A ssem bly associated his name with a m easure he had no part
in, Louis had m anaged sim ultaneously to show him self w illing to obstru ct
the abolition o f feudalism and to dem onstrate the nefarious aspect o f any
royal veto. T he O ctober rising, which saw the king ushered back to Paris
by the distrustful crow d, resolved this particular im passe.
T he count de M ontlosier testifies to the hostile respon se triggered by
Louis’s tepid and qualified initial reaction to the d ecrees: “ This response— so
74. Ran Halévi, “Monarchiens,” in François Furet and Mona Ozouf, A Critical Dictionary of the
French Revolution (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1969), 376-78.
75. On the struggle over “promulgation,” see Philippe-Antoine Merlin, Recueil alphabétique des
questions de droit (Brussels: Tarier, 1829), 4:238-40; Kessel, La nuit du 4 août, 253-64; Egret,
Necker, 358-64.
prudent, so generous, so reasonable, but offering an uncertain consent,

strongly affected the A ssem bly. For a m om ent it rem ained silen t Then:
‘What an insidious and perfidious rep ly,’ said M uguet de Nantou. For his
part, D uport characterized it as dangerous. Goupil de P réfelne called it
alarming. R obespierre declared that it was destru ctive.”76 B y m id-Septem
ber, som e in the A ssem bly saw the king as in league with the recalcitrant
nobility and clergy w ho aim ed to undo the events o f August 4 and w ere w ily
deterred by fear o f further risin gs.77 This confrontation had a while to run
yet, but by the tim e the king accepted that he had no ch oice but to go along
with the August d ecrees, he had gone far down the road to associating the
m onarchy w ith the feudal regim e. And he had gone dow n the road as w ell
to dem onstrating to som e that negotiations about royal authority, like
negotiations about the feudal regim e, only progressed under the threat o f
insurrection.78
Tocqueville m ade m uch o f the degree to which the Revolution, in sw eeping
away the rem nants o f the feudal order, actually com pleted the historic task
o f Louis’s forebears. M irabeau’s frustrated efforts to persuade the king that
the Revolution was in the interests o f the m onarchical state w ere shrew dly
seized on by T ocqueville for their ironic in sigh t79 Yet w e see that at least as
early as June 1789 Louis w as com m itting him self to the “ feudal” w orld about
to be sw ept away; in so doing, he rendered the political alignm ent dear to
revolutionary royalists like M irabeau unworkable, while easing the task o f
constructing a m ore radical vision o f a thoroughgoing rupture in which the
royal and feudal, in their mutual em brace, would be seen as indistinguishable
aspects o f a single, w om -out, and unenlightened past. But even as late as
the beginning o f 1790, a reservoir o f goodw ill was there for royal tapping.
D uquesnoy, w ho often described his legislative colleagues w ith a certain
sarcasm , renders their view s shortly before a royal appearance: “ although
the king doesn’t have extensive learning nor a profound intellect and although
he exp resses him self with som e difficulty, he has a sen se o f fairness, som e
clear ideas, but above all, an infinitely honest soul, a good and sensitive
heart and a burning d esire for the g ood .” 80
76. François-Dominique de Reynaud de Montlosier, Mémoires deM. de Comte de Montlosier sur

la Révolution française, le Consulat, l’Empire, la Restauration et les principaux événements qui font
suivie, 1775-1830 (Paris: Dufey, 1830), 1:244—45; see also Alexandre Lameth, Histoire de
t'Assemblée Constituante (Paris: Moutardier, 1828), 1:142.
77. Adrien Duquesnoy, Journal dAdrien Duquesnoy, 1:349; Lameth, Histoire, 1:140.
78. "The king, ceding to the wishes of the representatives of the people and perhaps also to the
force of circumstances, gave them his pure and simple approval [to the August decrees] that they
had asked for” (Lameth, Histoire, 1:143).
79. Alexis de Tocqueville, The Old Régime and the French Revolution (Garden City, N.Y.:
Doubleday, 1955), 8. Mirabeau hadeven contended that "monarchy only begins with the revolution
ary epoch.” See Honoré-Gabriel de Riquetti, comte de Mirabeau, Lettres du comte de Mirabeau à
ses commettants (Paris: Imprimerie du Patriote François, 1789-1791).
80. Duquesnoy, Journal, 2:254.
For quite som e tim e, any gestures that Louis m ade tow ard em bracing the
Revolution and tow ard honoring the National A ssem bly w ere not only
greeted with relieved acceptance, but w ere experienced by the legislators,
even by m uch o f the left, as m oving. In the m idst o f the w inter 1790 w ave
o f rural disturbances, Louis appeared at the National A ssem bly, esch ew ed
elaborate cerem onial deferen ce, spoke with warmth o f the A ssem bly’s w ork
and with sym pathy o f the frustrations stem m ing from renew ed insurrection
ary action when on e had expected peace. Capturing the A ssem bly’s passion
for education as the path to the new w orld, Louis announced “ in con cert
with the Q ueen, w ho shares all m y sentim ents, I shall, at an early m om ent,
prepare the mind and heart o f m y son for the new order o f things that
circum stances have brought. 1 shall give him the habit, from his early years,
o f being m ade happy by the happiness o f the French, and o f recognizing
always . . . that a w ise constitution shall p rotect him from the dangers o f
inexperience.” T heir public debate and personal letters show the A ssem bly
deeply m oved.81 A half-year later, w hen Louis publicly appeared to em brace
the role o f the constitutional, revolutionary “ king o f the French” 82 on the
first anniversary o f the attack cm the B astille, many in the National A ssem bly
w ere delighted to have him on board.83
T he event-filled years that follow ed 1789 w ere to show how persistently
som e hoped to make the Revolution w ith Louis rather than against him and
how persistently he had to opt for the m ost conservative forces to w reck
these hopes beyond repair. Far dow n the road, a significant group still
backed a constitutional m onarchy in the Legislative A ssem bly even w ith the
m onarch brought back from failed flight into captivity. Even the m onarch’s
plain disavow al o f the Revolution w as not enough to end notions o f a
m onarchical R evolution.84 M any o f those w ho from the first opposed the
feudal only very gradually found that they opposed the m onarchical as w ell.
Just as the international scen e cam e to be understood as a con flict over
feudalism versus liberty, the conflict o f king and assem bly w as in part a
conflict over feudalism . Small w onder that, ultim ately, royalism and feudal
ism seem ed to go hand in hand and could enter jointly into a global con cept
o f the “ Old R egim e.”85 The law o f July 17, 1793, reappropriated from
81. AP 11:429-32; Duquesnoy, Journal, 2:347-52; 354-57. For more details on this revealing
event, see Tackett, Becominga Revolutionary, 275-77.
82. Peter R. Campbell, “Louis XVI, King of the French,” in Cohn Lucas, ed., The French
Revolution and the Creation of Modem Political Culture, voL 2, The Political Culture of the French
Revolution (Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1988), 161-82.
83. Tackett, Becoming a Revolutionary.
84. C. J. Mitchell, The French LegislativeAssembly of1791 (Leiden: E. J. BiO, 1988), 208-20.
85. François Furet, "Anden Régime,” in François Furet and Mona Ozouf, A Critical Dictionary
of the French Revolution (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989), 604-15; Diego Venturino,
“La naissance de l’Ancien Régime.”
popular rage the seigneurial docum ents, now to b e cerem onially burned.
Burned when? On August 10, the first anniversary o f the attack on the
king’s palace by radical Parisians and provincial National Guards that pulled
the now captive king from his throne (AP 69:98). So com pletely had the
royal and feudal becom e fused in their joint death that one could celebrate
the first anniversary o f the overthrow o f the one by com pleting the
destruction o f the other.
The Rupture
If one only focu ses on the fate o f the seigneurial dues, “ the com plete
destruction o f the feudal regim e” looks like nothing else but a pathetic
fraud,86 the w ork o f the relevant com m ittees o f the various legislatures
appears so m uch hypocritical casuistry, and any enduring benefits to the
peasantry appear as seized from an unwilling new elite.87 If w e n ote
the genuineness o f the exaltation, alongside the undeniable hypocrisy, in
the legislatures, w e m ight add som e notion o f self-delusion. If w e n ote the
im m ediate and genuine suppression o f the purely honorific rights, o f such
im port to elite com m oners and o f such little im portance to the peasantry
(see Chapter 2, p. 47), w e m ight be led to com m ent as w ell on elite
m isperceptions o f the countryside: w e also would see that the legislators
had effected a break in what counted for them (especially if w e recall the
undercurrent o f attention to humiliation on the night o f August 4 ) (se e
Chapter 8, p. 458). If, how ever, w e see the seigneurial rights as a part o f
the “ feudal regim e” and consider the enactm ents o f August 4 -1 1 ,1 7 8 9 , and
the subsequent w ork o f the legislators across the full range o f what w as
held to be “feudal, ” m atters appear quite otherw ise. I believe there are tw o
essential points to note h ere: first, the seigneurial dues w ere only a part o f
the m ultiform com plex o f seigneurial rights; and secon d, the seigneurial
rights w ere but a part o f the broad sen se o f the feu dal I shall elaborate a bit
chi each o f these points.
Although the d ecrees o f August 4 -1 1 (as elaborated in M arch and M ay
1790) prom pted an indem nificatory schem e for dues that country people
resisted for years, much o f the seigneurial regim e w as actually abolished
outright, at least in principle. Perhaps, as Couthon noted in his speech o f
February 29, 1792, the pure claim s to honor, the m ost decisively sup
pressed, w ere o f relatively little interest in the countryside. But the sam e
86. See the evidence marshaled by Reichardt and Schmitt, “Rupture on continuité?”
87. But let us recall that rural opinion, expressed in the spring of 1789, did actualy show less
pressure for outright abolition of payments to the lord than for almost any other aspect of the
seigneurial regime; see Chapter 3, p. 73.
Words and T hon» 555
cannot be said for those honors that entailed m aterial harm to the peasants
(the right to com pulsory labor, to hunt and to raise pigeons, rabbits, fish),
w hich, on the evidence o f the parish cahiers, w ere plainly detested. T he
seigneurial cou rts, also abolished outright, had w eighed heavily on F rance's
rural com m unities in som e regions (although not oth ers) (see Chapter 3,
p. 114). Rem oving seigneurial tolls and controls over m arkets m ay have
been appreciated by the m ore com m ercial peasant strata; and ending
m onopolistic control o f m illing and baking and grape-pressing (unless the
lord could dem onstrate a consensual origin) w as also o f som e significance.
The seigneurial regim e, m oreover, hardly exhausted the scop e o f those
August m easures. In attacking the bases o f financing the church and o f
staffing governm ent p osts by sale o f office, in m oving against guilds as w ell
as the privileges o f order and province, the entire structure o f privilege and
the corporate conception o f society w ere attacked.88 In declaring an end to
tax privilege and privileged access to p osts and careers, the fundamental
equality o f the new citizens w as being established, and som e o f the m ost
im portant im plications o f that equality spelled out. In subjecting governm ent
pensions and subsidies to scrutiny, the rem oval o f ultim ate authority from
the person o f the king w as affirm ed. One m ight protest that the subsequent
indem nification o f venal officeholders (in parallel to the plan to indem nify the
lords) w as a good deal for the Old Regim e’s officialdom . TYue enough, but
what w as created, at one strok e, w as a society o f juridical equals w hose
relations w ere not governed by claim s o f tradition or immutable hierarchy
but by their autonom ous w ills entering into voluntary contracts. And as
individuals, all w ere to be equal: universal rather than particular law
(= “ privilege” ) would follow . To w hatever extent this im m ediately altered
anyone’s m aterial circum stances, it was a conceptual break with the p a st
On the one hand there w as the sovereign individual, secu re in his absolute
property, absolute in the sen se o f rights unconstrained by traditional,
com munal, or corporate organization; on the other hand, there w as the new
revolutionary state, also unconstrained by such interm ediary structures.
The am biguity o f the dual sovereignty o f individual and state w as to be
encapsulated in a definition in N apoleon’s Civil C ode: “ P roperty is the right
to en joy and dispose o f goods in the m ost absolute m anner, provided that
one d oes not m ake any use o f these goods that are prohibited by the laws
and regulations. ”89 In this light, as François Furet and Ran H alévi u rge,90
the sen se o f bringing an epoch to an end and o f creating the social w orld
88. This point is stressed by Michael P. Fitzsimmons, "Privilege and the Polity in France,
1786-1789,” American HistoricalReview 92 (1967): 269-95.
89. André-Jean Arnaud, Les origines doctrinales du code civilfrançais (Paris: Librairie Générale
de Droit et de Jurisprudence, 1969), 179.
90. François Furet and Ran Halévi, Orateurs de la Révolution française, voL 1, Les constituants
(Paris: Gallimard, 1989), bcvü-bcm
anew is readily graspable. Personal obligations are now held to derive from
voluntary contracts am ong equals and seen as exchanges o f property o f one
sort o r another rather than the inherent deferen ce o f inferiors to their
m asters. For the legislators, it was ep och al It is in this light that w e need
to see M erlin’s puzzlem ent that the country people do not acknow ledge the
great change o f redefining the sam e paym ents as consequences o f property
rights rather than feudal violen ce.
A Cultural Legacy
If it has seem ed to many, in the bourgeois w orld that coalesced after the
Revolution, that an abstract notion o f a m odem econom y w as necessarily
locked in battle w ith feudal anachronism s, enterprising lords in the eigh
teenth century often , in practice, utilized the seigneurial apparatus in their
seizure o f m arket opportunities. And con versely even the very con cep t o f
private property, w e have observed, served the rearguard as w ell as the
vanguard. T he w ork o f G eorges L efebvre posed the question o f the extent
to which the peasant risings w ere directed against som ething that m ight be
called a consolidating, m odem , capitalist order as opposed to a dying,
traditional feudal one. This m odem order, how ever, utilized the existing
seigneurial rights and arm ed itself with feudal law yers. And w hen the nobles
spoke, they not only looked to the responsibilities o f their public service as
the feudal w arrior class as justification for their rights but to the ultima ratio
o f the bourgeois order.
If seigneurial dues w ere no longer paid from 1789 on it w as not because
the National A ssem bly, as the self-con sciou s leaders o f the violent m asses
seized their historic m ission o f effectin g the fam ous transition from feudalism
to an as yet unnamed social form , but because in the disintegration o f the
coerciv e apparatus o f the state, the country people burnt the châteaux,
terrorized the lords, pillaged the legal docum ents, utterly refu sed to partici
pate in the indem nification schem e and, probably as significantly if less
dram atically, sim ply stopped paying when they discovered no one could
com pel them to do s o .91
But it is hard to see the seigneurial m achinery o f the late eighteenth
century as unam biguously precapitalist; it is im possible to see the National
A ssem bly as creating a bourgeois rural order when that had already largely
been in place; it is hard to see them as overthrow ing one econom ic system
91. At least one legislator was less hiUof the usual self-congratulation than many of his feBows:
“we would never have gotten to the point of applying and carrying out our principles except after
long and lively discussions, which would have been interminable, if the people hadn’t cut them short
and completed for itself its own emancipation’’ (Thibaudeau, Mémoires, 96).
and replacing it w ith another when they struggled so hard to change as little
o f the peasants’ obligations to the dominant strata as possible— at least in
the short run in which human beings actually live. Only gradually did the
revolutionary legislatures face up to the reality that no one could govern
France w ithout accepting that the peasants w eren’t paying any m ore. And
as w e saw in Chapter 8, it was the war that com pelled the Legislative
A ssem bly and then, m ore profoundly, the Convention to abandon the policy
o f ecstatic w ords o f self-praise for having abolished history com bined with
exhortation— backed by (inadequate) coercion — to keep on m eeting the
traditional obligations. To the extent that peasants w ere freed o f traditional
burdens, it w as in large part because they freed them selves. And even then,
large proprietors som etim es managed to subsum e old paym ents under
the new er and thoroughly legitim ated rental contracts, thereby achieving
precisely the vision o f M erlin and the Com m ittee on Feudal Rights. E ven
quite archaic form s o f seigneurial obligation w ere occasionally en forced w ell
into the new era.92
The Revolution’s legislators did have their ow n antiseigneurial agenda:
freeing m arket forces from the shackles o f the past; strengthening the
authority o f the state over a m ore uniform institutional structure; advancing
the m ovem ent tow ard a vision o f juridically equal individuals freely entering
contracts and policed by a state itself grounded in a primal contract, the
w ritten C onstitutíoa This latter achievem ent o f n ecessity entailed the
repudiation o f a vision o f collectivities with corporate rights (such as the
village com m unity), o f essential inequalities o f status recognized in law, o f
parcelized sovereignty and o f personal rulership ultim ately supported by
divine sanction. Claims o f custom w ere seen as m asks for initial acts o f
coercion and w ere no longer to be adm issible in a future society w hose
people, seen as individuals, w ere held to be bound together only by virtue
o f their uncoerced consent. The Third E state cahiers show a m odal tendency
for a generally indem nified phasing-out o f seigneurial rights that would
sim ultaneously bring about the desired social transform ation, would resp ect
those aspects o f seigneurialism that w ere assim ilable to notions o f property,
would strike a balanced com prom ise, would put m oney in the pockets o f
som e legislators them selves, and would p rotect the plan o f selling National
Property (w ith seigneurial rights attached) from ruin. W hen this program
w as dram atically announced on August 4 ,1 7 8 9 , and then developed in detail
in M arch 1790, there w ere those w ho rejected the consensus. Initially
dissenting on on e side w ere those legislators, largely noble, w ho refused
92. Pierre Massé, “Survivances des droits féodaux dans l'Ouest (1793-1902),” Annates Histori
ques de la Révolution Française 37 (1965): 270-98; Albert Soboul, “Survivances *féodales’ dans la
société rurale française au XIXe stéde," Anuales: Economies, Sociétés, Civilisations 23 (1968):
Q C C Q g
even a slow and indem nified phase-out, taking their stand cm property
rights. And, less vocal at first but ultim ately dissenting cm the oth er side,
w ere th ose w ho found all aspects o f seigneurialism illegitim ate, also taking
their stand on claim s o f property rights. T he original plan foundered in part
because no path to a new role for the king could be found; in part because
the reorganization o f the place o f the church could not be peacefully
accom plished; in part because the pressures from Parisian popular forces
continued to rem ake the political balance o f the legislatures; and, in very
large part, because som e o f the people erf the countryside, seizing the
opportunities opened by the weakening o f the coercive apparatus, the
search for a new institutional order am ong the new revolutionary elites, and
the openness to change o f som e sort on the part o f the preponderance o f
the new claim ants to authority, refused to dem obilize w ithout obtaining a
m uch m ore extensive and rapid dism antlem ent o f the seigneurial regim e.
But in their early insistence that they had made a decisive break the
revolutionaries in Paris helped define the Revolution as a rupture; in their
sense o f the feudal regim e as not m erely the seigneurial rights, but as an
institutional com plex reaching into every com er o f social life, they convinced
them selves and future generations o f intellectuals that the present w as bom
in a radical break with the p a st In evoking the broad connotations that
perm itted an undefined “feudal” to com e to characterize a social totality
(even as their law yers w ere groping for a restricted definition in the
unsuccessful attem pt to achieve the assent o f the rural population), those
w ho spoke for the Revolution told them selves that the w orld they w ere
making w as in every w ay a new creation, a creation bom from the m arriage
o f violen ce and reason. T he great m edievalist M arc B loch observed that
w henever w e think about “ feudalism ” today, “ [i]n the background there is
always a reflection o f the firing o f châteaux during the burning sum m er o f
'89. ” 93 For future revolutionaries, in the nineteenth century and beyond, the
Revolution suggested the possibility o f new such ruptures. And there w as a
legacy for the human scien ces as w ell. A sen se o f a disjunction betw een
past and present preceded the Revolution, as seen in the eighteenth-century
developm ent o f econom ics and history. But the dram atic intensity o f the
revolutionary experien ce served to concentrate the thoughts o f European
observers on the m eaning o f the Revolution and am plified a thousandfold the
sensation o f that upheaval. From the 1790s on, a European could hardly
think about social issues without thinking about the French R evolution.94
T he vision o f the revolutionaries thus m ade a pow erful contribution to
93. Marc Bloch, The Historian's Craft (New York: Vintage Books: 1953), 172.
94. Ronald Paulson brilliantly shows how images drawn from the revolutionary experience
permeated nineteenth-century art and literature. See Paulson, Representations ofRévolution, 1789-
1820 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983).
the conception o f a traditional/m odem dichotom y that becam e the central

problem atic for the nineteenth-century founders o f sociology.
The developm ent o f the contem porary social scien ces w as pow erfully
shaped by the sen se, already w idespread in W estern Europe in the eigh
teenth century and experienced much m ore intensely in the era that
follow ed, that the w orld o f contem porary experience differed strikingly from
the w orld o f the past; that change in social relationships, institutions, and
patterns o f thought w as an ongoing p rocess; and that to som e exten t the
direction o f change w as subject to human w ill. Intellectuals differed greatly
in their evaluation o f this state o f affairs; but w hether one regarded the
passing o f the old with dism ay or looked to the future with hope, the
passionate and concern ed sense o f the present social order as radically
distinct energized the variety o f reflection s on our collective life that becam e
the social scien ces. Thus w e may roughly date m odem econom ics from
Adam Smith’s sen se o f the advanced com m ercial society o f England as one
that both drew upon and liberated the natural human tendency “ to truck,
barter and exchange.” T he em ergence o f the m odem discipline o f history
surely ow es m uch, as K rzysztof Pomian has contended, to a sen se o f the
past as genuinely past and gone, and thereby able to yield up its docum ents
to the scrutiny o f scholars w ho claim to be m otivated by a disinterested
desire to understand.95 And sociology w as pow erfully shaped by a sen se o f
an institutional and cultural divide that separated status from contract,
Gemeinschaft from Gesellschaft and so on through a large num ber o f such
paired conception s, including the term s that have shaped and m isshaped the
outlook o f generations o f Am erican sociologists, the gap betw een the
traditional and the m odem . Perhaps no set o f paired im ages has been m ore
w idely influential than feudalism /capitalism and no problem m ore vexing than
the transition that led from the one to the other.
The im age o f a tem poral rupture that separated tw o form s o f social life
was a legacy that guided, inspired, and blinded m ore than the scholar. It
galvanized a w ay o f acting in the w orld by providing a secularized transform a
tion o f a Christian universe in which a w orldly d ty w as opposed to a C ity o f
G od, in which the flow o f tim e underwent breaks betw een the Old and the
N ew, in which history advanced tow ard godliness in jum ps as revealed in
the transition from one such epoch to the n ex t B y retaining the em otive
pow er o f such im agery, but substituting national history for sacred history;
by tracing the defining characteristics o f an age to the transform ation o f
institutions rather than the w orkings o f the H oly Spirit; by imagining change
as the w orking-out o f human rather than divine w ill; by locating sacrality in
rights that could be legislated rather than in royal persons divinely con se-
95. Krzysztof Pomian, "Les historiens et les archives dans la France du XVDe siècle,” Acta
PotomacHistórica 26 (1972): 109-25.
crated, the w ay w as open for new generations in distant lands to create

local versions o f this no longer specifically Christian vision. M uch o f the
thinking behind this was taking place in W estern E urope and its colonial
offsh oots betw een the very religious (and th erefore culturally sp ecific)
English Revolution o f the 1640s and the French Revolution o f 1789. But the
passionate conviction that here and now w e have actually carried out the
total destruction o f the feudal regim e and with that destruction an entire
state o f civilization w as transform ed alm ost at on ce into som ething new has
rem ained a pow erful m odel o f what was possible.
C h apter
io
Conclusion: From
Grievances to Revolution
A Serf Meets Legislators

O ctober 23, 1789. In the w eeks that follow ed the im passioned discussions
touched o ff on the night o f August 4, the National A ssem bly w as absorbed
in its very full agenda. M any session s began with a reading o f letters from
various com m unities announcing their adhesion to the w ork o f national
regeneration. On this particular m orning, the A ssem bly w elcom ed a live
guest from serf country: an “ old man o f one hundred tw enty years, bom at
M ont-Jura: he w ishes to see the A ssem bly that has freed his country
from the bonds o f servitude.” The legislators had developed the keenest
sensitivities as to w ho m ight sit before whom , w hose hats w ere to be doffed
and w hose not, and the like, as the representatives o f a free people
continuously renegotiated such cerem onial issues w ith the representative o f
the king. For the nobles am ong them , having been— or not been— presented
to the king would at one point have been the w eightiest o f m atters. N ow the
old serf, on crutches, and, according to the biography that instantly ap
peared,1 blind and hard o f hearing, helped by his fam ily, w as introduced and
the legislators, at G régoire’s suggestion, stood . W hen the old man took his
seat and put on his hat “ [t]h e hall rang with applause” (A P 9:4 8 4 ). T h e
honored gu est displayed his baptism al record, which, indeed, read 1669.
One deputy called for a m odest sum to be raised (the count de Prashn
soon presented 8,377 livres on behalf o f an infantry regim ent); another
announced a plan for an exem plary m odel o f the resp ect youth ow ed age in
the form o f having young children assist the form er serf (especially those
“ w hose fathers w ere killed in the attack on Bastille”). M irabeau interjected,
“ D o what you want for this old man, but leave him alone.” Perhaps cutting
o ff further com m ents, the chair expressed his concern about exhausting the
distinguished visitor and added that the A ssem bly “ desires that you enjoy
for a long tim e the sight o f your country com pletely freed ” (A P 9:4 8 4 ). One
contem porary was so m oved that he w ent on to w rite a biography o f this
man, an honor, like the cerem onial deferen ce show n by legislators, that
used to be for the kings o f this w orld.2 His biographer sees him as em inently
w orthy o f em ulation, attributing his long life to piety, hard w ork, dean living,
and the avoidance, until recently, o f the m edical profession .
Although the legislators w ere m oved by their gu est and by their ow n
partidpation in com pletely freeing their country, one may w ell w onder at
how thankful other villagers in Franche-Com té w ere when the legislation o f
M arch and M ay 1790 fixed ju st how much they still ow ed their form er lords.
Did they take the sam e satisfaction in paying rents rather than servile
obligations as the deputies did in thus redefining their status? Perhaps,3 but
other peasants, as w e have repeatedly seen, w ere not at all satisfied. W hen
the old man died tw o m onths after his visit to the A ssem bly, a new w ave o f
peasant insurrection was building up steam in Brittany and the S outhw est
A grateful serf honored by legislators proud o f their legislative achieve
m ents; peasants in one province accepting the new laws, w hile peasants
elsew here w ere renew ing their fight— elem ents o f the dynam ic, evolving
relationships o f those at the cen ters o f visible authority w ho w rote the laws
and th ose in near and distant villages w ho w ere pleased, w ho acquiesced or
w ho com plained, deceived and openly challenged. If the dialogue o f peasants
1. JeanJoseph Pithou, Vie deJeanJacob, vieillard de Mont-Jura, âgé de 120 ans, pensioné de Sa
Majesté à laquelle il a été présenté depuispeu ainsi qu'à TAssembléeNationale (Paris: \Wleyre, 1789).
2. Apart from police reports on the mutinous, biographies oí prerevolutionary French plebeians
can be counted on the fingers of one hand.
3. The lawyer Christin, deputy from Aval and former partner of \foltaire in the struggle for
freeing the serfs, thought that former serfs from h» province were not only grateful, but deserving
of praise for “their submission to the laws, and their most profound respect for properties, even for
those of the canons of Saint-Claude, who had for so long upjustly oppressed them"; quoted in
Alphonse Aulard, La Révolution française et le régimeféodal (Paris: Alcan, 1919), 116-17. Grateful
serfs of Saint-Claude did thank the king; see Kessel, La nuit du 4 août 1789 (Paris: Arthaud,
1969), 242-43.
Conclusion 563
and legislators w as com plex, "peasants” and ‘legislators” w ere them selves
com plex entities. Country people variously lived in regions that grew
w heat, supported dom estic textile production, raised animals; carried out
production through the labor o f sm allholders, sharecroppers, and w age
laborers; w ere m ore or less densely endow ed w ith roads, royal officials,
literacy, com m unal and provincial self-governm ent; and had different local
traditions o f resistance.
A peasant com m unity m ight be m ore highly stratified or m ore egalitarian
and have m ore or less serious divisions am ong landow ners, renters, and the
landless, producers for the m arket and consum ers, those rooted in the
com m unity and seasonal w orkers, older peasants w ith legal title to land and
younger ones dependent on fathers and b osses. In one village, a past
triumph over a tax collector m ight be a proud m em ory; in another, the pain
o f judicial punishm ent follow ing a challenge to grain prices m ight be on
people’s m inds. Peasants in different regions and in different locations in the
village w orld som etim es had com m on interests and som etim es divergent
on es; on som e issues and at som e tim es they acted, w ithout explicit
coordination, in mutual support; at other tim es they pulled in different direc
tions.
T he legislators, too, differed am ong them selves in their visions o f a future
France, the place o f the countryside in that future and the tactics to achieve
that end. And from one m om ent to the next, the ensem ble o f issu es the
legislators confronted w as altering, and altering w ith it their sense o f how
to handle the rural rebels. To understand legislature and countryside, both,
w e need a sense o f their points o f division: at one m om ent som e provinces,
but not others, nurtured m ovem ents with som e targets but not w ith others
and challenged a legislature confronting particular constellations o f other
challenges with particular internal divisions. We have tried to see this
m ultiplex dialogue by tracking the intertw ined trajectories o f peasant insur
rection and revolutionary legislation.
A Peasant-Bourgeois Alliance
Revolutionary peasants and revolutionary legislators togeth er ended the
seigneurial regim e. H ow w as this antiseigneurial convergence achieved? In
the historical literature, there are tw o principal grand narratives o f the
Revolution within which this joining o f forces has an im portant place, a
M arxian story and a Tocquevillean one. In what is generally characterized
as a M arxist account,4 transform ations in the m aterial conditions o f existen ce
4. The identification of this particular narrative as the Marxist account is subject to challenge in
are held to bring about new structures o f in terest T h ese structures align
people in new patterns o f con flict as they com e to have a sen se o f their
com m onalities o f interest with som e and their antagonistic interest in
relation to others. T he sen se o f identity that thereby develops is deepened
to the exten t that people organize them selves for the purposes o f advancing
the interests o f their group against others.
The advance o f the m arketplace as an organizing principle for social
relations provided one o f the m ost im portant institutional fram ew orks around
which group in terests, group allegiances, and group antagonism s form ed in
early m odem E urope; within this m atrix an antifeudal alliance o f a cram ped
bourgeoisie and a threatened peasantry w as forged. In A lbert Soboul’s
version, a w ealthy and cultivated urban bourgeoisie cam e to occu py “ the
leading position in society, a position which w as at variance w ith the official
existen ce o f privileged ord ers.” 5 An enorm ously active and prosperous class
o f financiers, m erchants, and m anufacturers w ere poised to take advantage
o f econom ic change, Soboul continues. M aterial transform ation had a cultural
counterpart: “ [t]h e econom ic base o f society w as changing, and w ith it
ideologies w ere being m odified” (66). A critique o f the existing ord er w as
elaborated on behalf o f individual rights, property, equality b efore the law,
rationality, p rogress, and freedom . A developing body o f professionals—
legal professionals in particular— proved increasingly capable o f representing
th ese new interests and new ideas (4 5 -4 6 ). The w hole m ovem ent cam e to
resen t the m ultiple injuries o f what w as left o f feudalism : its lim itations on
property rights and individual initiative, its deleterious effect on agricultural
p rogress, its identification w ith the irrational past rather than the rationality
o f the future.
The peasantry w ere equally if differently hostile to seigneuriaHsm. Al
though there w ere im portant differences o f interest within individual peasant
com m unities and im portant regional differences in the social structures that
developed in the rural w orld, there w as a broad unity in distress at the high
levels o f burden im posed by state, church, and lord, am ong which the claim s
o f the lord w ere the m ost resented. In the eighteenth century the lords,
m oreover, utilized the structures o f seigneuriaHsm to enhance their capacity
several ways: one might debate whether it is distinctively Marxist rather than shared with a broad
school of nineteenth-century French liberal historiography; one might debate whether it captures
what is most interesting in how Marx understood the Revolution or is even accurate as a statement
of his views; and one might point to the great diversity of thinking among those who locate
themselves as Marxists. See François Furet, Marx and the French Revolution (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1968); Eric Hobsbawm, “The Making of a Bourgeois Revolution,” in Ferenc
Fehér, The French Revolution and the Birth ofModernity (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of
California Press, 1990), 30-48; George C. Comninel, Rethinking the French Revolution: Marxism
and the Revisionist Challenge (London: Verso, 1987).
5. Albert Soboul, The French Revolution, 1789-1799: From the Storming of the Bastille (New
York: Vintage Books, 1975), 44.
Conclusion 565
to take advantage o f the developm ent o f the m arket E xactions, Soboul goes
on, w ere tightened to force peasants to seO out so that the lord’s holdings
could be rationalized and enlarged; communal rights o f various sorts cam e
under attack as lords, encouraged by the new doctrines o f the physiocrats,
aim ed at increasing their incom es still further (5 8 -6 7 ). A s for the ch ief
beneficiaries o f the old order, the nobility w ere in the d eep est disarray.
Som e em braced the form s o f econom ic activity being opened up and others
cham pioned liberal reform ; still others, how ever, reacted to threat by m ore
scrupulously collectin g their traditional sources o f incom e at peasant expense
and by reasserting their traditional claim s against grow ing state rationaliza
tion (3 4 -3 8 ).
Tocqueville, too, saw a coincidence o f peasant and bourgeois interests
against seigneurial rights, but he located the m atrix o f this tacit alliance in a
cultural shift that was in turn rooted in the enlargem ent o f state pow er and
authority.6 The long p rocess o f central state developm ent, Tocqueville
argued, eroded the basis on which others would accept the positions o f
nobles and lords in French society. State developm ent also entailed a
cultural transform ation o f the nobility itself which cam e rather close to
preparing them for their ow n elim ination as a social force. W ith regard to
the first point, Tocqueville presented a detailed analysis o f the legitim acy o f
the social order as a question o f services. O ne's sen se o f ju stice is not
violated, in this view , to the extent that greater rew ards accrue to those
w ho perform greater services. To the extent that the nobility w ere central
in the provision o f services through their responsible dom ination o f public
affairs, to the extent that noble lords furnished protection from violen ce,
maintained the roads, policed econom ic transactions, su ccored the poor,
supported the true Church and dispensed ju stice am ong the contentious,
the privileges o f the nobility and o f the lords could be seen as so many
deserved benefits. The lords’ social role was substantial, they bore the
costs o f perform ing that role and they w ere, perhaps, seen as indispensable.
But as these functions passed into the hands o f the central state, the entire
justification for noble and seigneurial privilege evaporated. A s, for exam ple,
the legitim ate exercise o f violen ce becam e the task o f the royal arm y or as
the policing o f the econom ic life o f the kingdom passed into the hands o f
governm ent inspectors and planners, the m oral acceptability o f a special
noble or seigneurial status was eroded, even though the king's generals and
the king’s econom ic m anagers w ere them selves recruited from the nobility.7
6. For a discussion of Tocquevfle’s Old Regime as an account of cultural transformation see

Sasha R. Wattman, “Regime Practice and Mass-Political Dispositions: Reflections on the Old Regime
and the Revolution,” paper presented to the Bicentennial Conference on the French Revolution,
George Washington University, May 1989. See also the same author’s "The Sociological Thesis of
Tocqueville’s The OldRegime and theRevolution," SocialResearch 33 (1966): 389-406.
7. Alexis de IbcqueviDe, The Old Regime and the French Revolution (Garden City, N.Y.:
Doubleday, 1955), 32-41.
A s the n obles' public responsibilities w ere being w hittled away, royal

policy tended to leave their privileges intact in the hope o f obtaining their
assent to the changing institutions o f France. Indeed, on e may speak o f the
grow th o f new areas o f privilege, for the nobility often su cceeded in assuring
itself privileged consideration for the positions opened up by the expanding
central governm ent (T he m ore pow erful and potentially dangerous nobles
w ere often granted governm ent subsidies.)
In its ow n adjustm ent to the new social con text in which royal bureaucrats
w ere beginning to im pose som ething o f a universafistic and antitraditionalist
approach to public fife, the nobility itself underw ent a profound m oral
change. T he actions and thoughts w hose cen ter w as the Paris-based
bureaucracy increasingly refused to recognize the sanctity o f local and
regional distinctions, or birth-based differences am ong the king’s subjects,
or o f anything but im personal and technical criteria for the m aking o f
decisions. T he em erging state w as beginning to recogn ize isolated individu
als rather than long-standing, hierarchical, and corporate bodies as the true
com ponents o f the social order. Even the nobility participated as highly
placed agents o f the bureaucratizing governm ent TTie many nobles w ho
w ere negotiating with the state and trying to adjust to it, w ere, in T ocqu e-
ville’s view , largely w on over to its values. T heir ow n w orldview w as
increasingly indistinguishable from that o f other w ell-to-do persons. T he
centralized character o f France “ had cast the minds o f all in the sam e m old
and given them the sam e equipm ent.” T hey did not differ in values from the
bourgeoisie but only in privilege (Old Regime, 81). W hile elite com m oners
resen ted noble distinctions, the nobility enjoyed participating in an intellec
tual culture fundam entally antithetical to their ow n prerogatives (142). In
the M iddle A ges, “ the nobles enjoyed invidious privileges and rights that
w eighted heavily (Hi the com m oner, but in return for this they kept ord er,
adm inistered ju stice, saw to the execution o f the laws, cam e to the rescu e
o f the oppressed, and w atched over the interests o f alL T he m ore th ese
functions passed out o f the hands o f the nobility, the m ore uncalled for
did their privileges appear— until at last their m ere existen ce seem ed a
m eaningless anachronism ” (30).
A s for the peasantry, the m ilitary and political erosion o f the lord’s role
had turned a once-genuine protector into an exploiter. Tocqueville here is
elaborating a particular French instance o f a p rocess com m only discussed in
much o f the recen t com parative literature on peasant re v o lt D o local
landholders have responsibilities tow ard their dependents? Subjection to
increasingly effective bureaucratic states or, for that m atter, to the m arket,
is held to erode traditional clientefistic rural relationships. The position o f
the local elites shifts radically as their communal responsibilities becom es a
m em ory, as opportunities for them to profit by greater exactions com bines
with greater pressures on them to do so, and as their capacity to call on the
Conclusion 567
coerciv e apparatus o f effective central authorities decreases their need to

live up to traditional legitim ating im ages o f the good lord. The w ork o f James
S cott in particular touched o ff quite a lively debate. S cott depicted a “ m oral
econ om y" that had on ce protected the claim s to subsistence o f the peasant
com m unity. Landowning elites, bound by that m oral econom y, perform ed a
vital role, but one that ultim ately succum bed to the forces o f change.*
B oth interpretive fram ew orks make sen se o f a peasant-bourgeois alliance
against the lord s.89 But, as Lynn Hunt tellingly points out, neither grapples
with the Revolution itself as a political p rocess.10 The peasant-bourgeois
alliance is seen as a rather straightforw ard by-product o f the com m on
interest o f peasants and bourgeois in dism antling the seigneurial regim e.
Long-term structural change reoriented group interests in turning an envi
ous com m oner elite and a subordinate peasantry against the lords o f
France: revolutionary antiseigneurialism , given this con text, w as a foregon e
conclusion11 and on e can only debate the relative contribution o f peasants
and legislators to that end. Thus critics o f one or another o f th ese structural
ist accounts deny the antiseigneurialism o f the countryside (T aylor) or o f the
bourgeoisie (C obban) or deny the im pact o f antiseigneurial insurrection
(R oot). A s w e shall soon see, w hile som e populist accounts m ake peasant
8. James Scott, The MoralEconomy of the Peasant Rebellion and Subsistence in SoutheastAsia
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976); Samuel Fopkin, The Rational Peasant The Political
Economy of Rural Society in Vietnam (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press,
1979); Charles F. Keyes, ed., “Symposium: Peasant Strategies inAsian Societies," Journal ofAsian
Studies 42 (1983): 753-868; Theda Skocpol, “What Makes Peasants Revolutionary?” Comparative
Politics 14 (1982): 351-75; Hy Van Luong, “Agrarian Unrest from an Anthropological Perspective:
The Case of Vietnam,” ComparativePolitics 17 (1985): 153-74.
9. There are other broad interpretative frameworks, most notably the claim that the motor of
revolution was a demographic increase in collision with institutional inertia: rapid population growth
generated intractable problems for state revenues that were difficult to increase given the rigidities
of the tax system; the children of the elites were threatened with blocked career opportunities since
appropriate elite positions were expanding more slowly than the numbers of young elite members
seeking their fortunes; and the standard of living of rural populations was threatened, a process that
showed up in deteriorating lease terms, declines in real wages, and land scarcities. These three
processes exacerbated each other. This thesis has the virtue of integrating state fiscal crisis, elite
division, and popular mobilization into a single process. (The skeptical might see this as a vice.)
While rather effective in explaining the timing of the Revolution, this demographic-structural
approach sheds no light on the specific issues around which conflict arose. For the most impressive
analysis of the Revolution along these lines, see Jack A. Goldstone, Revolution andRebellion in the
Early Modem World (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1991), 170-348.
10. Lynn Hunt, Politics, Culture and Class in the French Revolution (Berkeley and Los Angeles:
University of California Press, 1984), 1-16.
11. The phrase is used in the title of TocqueviDe’s final chapter “How, given the facts set forth
in the preceding chapters, the Revolution was a foregone conclusion” (Old Regime and Revolution,
203); a Marxian equivalent is the evocation of the chains which, having to be broken, were broken;
see Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, "Manifesto of the Communist Party,” in Marx and Engels,
Selected Works (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1955), 1:39.
insurrection everything, carrying a hypocritical elite o f footdraggers b efore

it, other scholars, stressing elite political discourse, deny that rural insurrec
tion added very m uch to an essentially legislative breakthrough.
T he evidence that w e have exam ined, how ever, suggests a rather
different w ay o f thinking about the dismantling o f the seigneurial rights.
Certainly there w ere long-term changes o f the sorts dear to both M arxists
and Tocquevilleans: the m arket and the state both expanded in significance
and becam e increasingly w eighty in village lives. Im portant elem ents o f both
accounts w ere also part o f the self-understandings o f som e revolutionary
participants. T he Third E state o f A rbois adds a supplem ent to the cahier o f
Aval that em bodies a Tocquevillean outlook when they w rite: “ All dues and
all rights that are part o f the old feudalism that com m unities pay to their lords
by reason o f services no longer ow ed by the lords shall be su p pressed ."12 S o
do their fellow s o f Annonay in calling for the indem nification o f som e rights
w hile reserving abolition without com pensation for “ those for which the
reason no longer exists” CAP 3 :5 2 ). A s for the M arxian thesis, w e have
noted its Bam avian preincam ation, which stressed the pow er o f com m erce
to transform social institutions (see Chapter 4, p. 180). We also see in the
cahiers a pattern o f opinion that at points seem s what (Hie would exp ect in
the M arxist account and at other points fits the Tocquevillean m odel.
M arxists, for exam ple, w ould find it easy to understand the com bination o f
a focu s on m arket restrictions and a focu s on privilege that characterizes the
cahiers o f the Third E state; Tocquevilleans would find sim ilarly clear the
nobles com bining a concern with civil liberties with a concern for state
finances (se e Chapter 2, pp. 29, 35). T he geography o f insurrection also
suggests that som e w eight be given to m arket forces and som e to statem ak
ing. M arxists, for exam ple, would feel on familiar ground observing how
regions o f m arket activity sparked a w ide range o f peasant insurrections, as
would Tocquevilleans observing the insurrection-generating qualities o f
areas w here the central adm inistration’s control w as unim peded by a
politically w eighty aristocratic corps (see Chapter 7, pp. 375, 377, 396,
407). And the available evidence on long-term change over tim e in patterns
o f stating grievances and staging rebellions since the seventeenth century
points to the shift tow ard attacking the seigneurial regim e that both the
M arxian and Tocquevillean fram ew orks insist upon. The com parison o f the
cahiers o f 1789 to the cahiers o f 1614 brings out clearly that a focu s on the
exactions o f the state w as dow n w hile a focu s on the lords w as up (se e
Chapter 3, p. 134). A s for insurrections, their frequency w as not only rising
tow ard the end o f the Old Regim e but their targets w ere increasingly
seigneurial (see Chapter 5, p. 265).
12. Beatrice Fry Hyslop, A Guide to the General Cahiers of 1789, with the Texts of Unedited
Cahiers (New York: Octagon Books, 1968), 217.
Conclusion 9C £0 Q7
N onetheless, there are lim itations to the explanatory pow er o f an exclu

sive focu s on long-term stru ctu res.13 Although the developm ent o f the state
and the m arket m ay have decreased the tolerance o f many for the lord 's
prerogatives, w e have review ed am ide evidence that, in them selves, these
structural changes did not bring either urban notables or peasants to the
point o f totally overthrow ing the seigneurial regim e. In the first place the
cahiers show that even if seigneurial rights w ere a w eightier agenda item
than they had been in 1614, they w ere, still, a lesser concern than taxation
at the ou tset o f revolution (see Chapter 5, p. 265); T h ere w ere also many
dem ands for reform or indem nification as w ell as abolition in all three groups
o f docum ents (se e Chapter 3 ). T he study o f the early insurrections,
m oreover, show s how insignificant, at first, w ere actions against the lords,
particularly when th ese are seen in com parison to subsistence events (se e
F igs. 6 .3 [a M d ]). And if w e turn to the legislative arena early in the
Revolution, w e note that the general tone o f radical break that hovered over
the night o f August 4 ,1 7 8 9 , was consistent with a very conservative stance
on many o f the seigneurial rights (see Chapters 8 and 9 ). T he intricate
dance by which peasants cam e to m ake their ch ief target the seigneurial
rights w hile legislators revam ped their enactm ents had to be invented. It
was in no w ay given at the ou tset
Recapitulation
L et us review the steps in the argum ent Chapter 2 exam ined the cahiers de
doléances in ord er to identify the place o f the seigneurial rights on the
agendas o f the country people, the urban notables, and the nobility. T he
three faced the Revolution differently. W hile all had in com m on considerable
attention to the broad questions o f taxation, the nobility w ere quite distinc
tive for their attention to the constitutional issues posed by the advance o f
the central state. T h ey w ere sensitive to issues o f civil liberties, o f the
authority o f the E states-G eneral, o f the rule o f law (see p. 29). A T ocquevil-
lean w ould surm ise that their sen se o f identification with an im agined past
autonom y was the glue that held together these notions o f rights threatened
by arbitrary state authority. D eveloping the sen se that controls o f various
sorts needed to be put on the sw elling state— a constitution, a legal
cod e, stable judicial procedures, a representative legislative body, regional
13. I befieve tUs to be the core pomt in the critiques by George Tbylor and Wffiam Doyle of
previous writing on the overal course of the Revolution. When Tbyior suggests that what began as
a “political" process turned into a “social” one, he is urging us to look for a revolutionary dynamic;
smdarty for Doyle when he urges us to see revolutionaries “created by the Revolution,” rather than
the reverse; Ibylor, “Revolutionary and Nonrevotutiooary Content”; Doyle, Origins, 213.
authorities with defined pow ers, supervision over finances, m inisterial re
sponsibility— the nobles also put forth the con cept o f a personal sphere on
which the state is not to intrude: property (see p. 34). On the seigneurial
rights, many noble cahiers maintained a d iscreet silence (se e p. 56). (W ere
they uncertain, divided, prudent— or em barrassed?) W hen they did speak
o f d iese rights, how ever, they tended to stress their honorific rather than
their lucrative aspects (see pp. 4 7 -5 0 ). O r at least they tended to daim
they did so: when, to glance at Chapter 3, one lod es rather closely at what
som e o f the noble cahiers purport to be issues o f honor one can see that
significant m aterial claim s are som etim es involved (see p. 80 e t seq ). T he
nobility seem quite unconcerned with aspects o f seigneurialism that suggest
a finely graded status hierarchy am ong the lords them selves. T hey defended
their rights, then, as “ property” (w hen they didn’t invoke their “honor” )
(see pp. 7 9 -8 5 ). A M arxist m ight see in this noble rhetoric the pre
revolutionary triumph o f the w orldview o f the bourgeois order; a T ocquevil-
lean m ight think o f a cultural adaptation to the antihierarchical leveling o f the
m odernizing state bureaucracy.
One m ight situate this issue m ore broadly within the debate on the social
bases o f the Enlightenment* w here a M arxist view sees the language o f
individuality and liberty as an intellectually coherent m oral rationale for
the profit-m aking, antitraditional, and rationalizing thrust o f a developing
capitalism chafing under legal structures and social practices that inhibit the
full flow ering o f the m arketplace,14 a m ore Tocquevillean view m ight suggest
that w e see, as D enis R ichet d o e s,15 the Enlightenm ent program as an
aristocrat’s reaction to the threat o f autonom y posed by the grow ing state,
a reaction later joined by (rather than initiated by) flourishing com m ercial
in terests. In any event, w hen it is not downright silent on seigneurial rights,
the noble defen se had already accepted the central term s o f the discourse
o f property and individual liberty with which those rights w ere attacked.
T he m ost distinctive aspects o f the Third E state’s agenda w ere its
concern s with privilege and with m arket hindrances (see pp. 35, 5 0 -5 2 ,
62). W here the nobility tended to focu s on issues o f liberty in the sen se o f
freedom from an arbitrary state the Third tended to focu s on freedom to
14. Albert Soboul entitles a chapter on the Enlightenment "The Philosophy of die Bourgeoisie."
He teds us that “the intellectual origins of the Revolution are to be sought in the philosophy that the
bourgeoisie elaborated since the 17th century.” We learn in the next few pages that Vfoltaire’s aim
was “to give the government over to bourgeois proprietors” while Rousseau may be seen as
expressing “the political and social ideal of the petite bourgeoisie.” Soboul goes on to find the unity
of French Enlightenment thought in its “opposition to aristocracy.” As for their constitutional views
we are told that “the upper bourgeoisie was aware that the development of capitalism required a
transformation of the State”; Soboul, La Révolution française (Paris: Editions Sociales, 1962),
1:69-79.
15. Denis Richet, La France moderne: L’esprit des institutions (Paris: Flammarion, 1973).
Conclusion 571
participate in the m arket, unconstrained by state, com m unal, or seigneurial

barriers. T he juridical equality o f all within the national com m unity, their
other m ajor distinctive focu s, intersected this first concern in num erous
w ays (see p. 35). T o elim inate fiscal privilege m eant that special taxes on
noble land that distorted land transactions would have to go; to elim inate
privileged, even m onopolistic, access to high-level careers would m ean that
those w ith skills could trade those skills for incom e and responsibility in a
sort o f job m arket (Mthe career open to talent” ); to abandon regional
privilege would advance the task o f integrating the national m arket W ith
regard to the seigneurial rights, consistently enough, it w as seigneurial
claim s to limit the m arket via m onopolies, to have private claim s on tolls and
to com m and peasant labor that aroused the urban notables’ greatest concern
(see pp. 5 0 -5 2 ). T he attack on privilege ("private law” in its root m eaning)
necessarily entailed attacking many elem ents o f the seigneurial regim e,
often seen , in the historical accounts o f the day, as the legacy o f a vid en t
era o f privately appropriated sovereign ty.16 Rather than an im age o f a
society com posed o f hierarchically related corporate groups with distinct
rights and obligations, w hose structure w as given by G od and tradition, and
which w as supervised by the state, the new society w ould be seen as
com posed o f form ally equal individuals w ho could invent and reinvent their
relationships through freely consented contracts and to whom the state w as
responsible. M arxist historians would readily recogn ize the grow ing m arket
opportunities as the likely root o f many o f these Third E state concern s. T he
antiprivilege aspect o f the distinctive Third E state agenda, how ever, is even
m ore readily assim ilable into the Tocquevillean argum ent about the leveling
effect o f a grow ing state that w ipes out the m eaningfully everyday character
o f local difference and personal privilege.
T he peasants’ agenda is far sim pler to characterize. A s show n in the
parish cahiers, they w ere not particularly concerned with constitutional
arrangem ents; they w ere focu sed on the details o f the claim s upon them by
state, church, and lord. N early half o f their grievances involve on e or
another burden, a strikingly larger figure than for the nobility or Third
E state (see Table 2 .2 ). The peasants show relatively little concern for the
sym bolizations o f status, far less than the Third d oes, which, to look ahead,
may help to explain w hy many peasant com m unities seem ed so indifferent
to an abolition o f ju st those rights that was so proudly proclaim ed by the
revolutionary legislature in August 1789 (see p. 48, Table 2 .4 , and p. 475).
T he peasants also seem ed little interested in the lord’s agents, surprising in
16. The Third Estate of Poitiers speaks of the authority that the lords usurped during the
centuries of “ignorance, anarchy and confusion.” For the Third of Auray, the rights "recall for us
the centuries of rage and blindness.” The Third of Toul sees many rights as “extorted before joining
in the union with the crown.” For the Third of Vrtry-le-françois, monopolies and corvées “have no
other principle than as the old vestiges of barbarism and slavery” (4P 5:412; AP 6:13,115, 219).
light o f a literature that has often argued that by giving the seigneurial
regim e a human face, these agents deflected attention from the lords (se e
p. 53). But w e saw little personalization at all, as if the peasants clearly
grasped the system ic character o f seigneurialism , rather than focusing on
individual w rongdoers.
T he antiseigneurial elem ent in the cahiers o f the Third E state, coupled
with a nobility a significant portion o f w hose assem blies offered no public
defen se at all w hile others put forw ard a defen se m ounted in term s o f the
property rights so dear to the Third E state, jointly constituted an im portant
opening for peasant action. And peasant andseigneuriabsm , in its turn,
constituted an im portant opening for action on the part o f the antiseigneurial
elem ents o f the urban notability. The potential for an antiseigneurial alliance
o f peasants and legislators w as there in the cahiers. But only the potential:
far m ore peasant attention in the spring o f 1789 was given to taxation, the
antiseigneurialism o f the urban notables was far from identical to that o f the
peasantry and aspects o f the Third E state’s position w ere antithetical to the
interests o f significant rural segm ents.
Chapter 3 took up the program s o f the three groups. We saw considerable
openness to change am ong all three groups and little support for the
unreform ed preservation o f m ost institutions (see, e .g ., Table 3 .3 ). W hile
the nobility w ere appreciably m ore conservative than the Third E state, their
em brace o f change is striking and not readily com patible w ith those many
versions o f the basic M arxian m odel, which would have the nobility attached
to a w ay o f life under attack;17 the pervasive em brace o f change seem s m ore
easily consistent with Tocqueville’s notion o f a general cultural transform a
tion. On the seigneurial rights, how ever, a significant portion o f the nobility
(and only the nobility) did indeed dig in its heels.
We saw that the seigneurial regim e was less likely than m ost areas o f
French life to have attracted proposals for reform (see Tables 3 .1 and 3 .2 ).
In this regard it differed profoundly from taxation, which, although the
subject o f many m ore grievances, also attracted many reform proposals.
The peasants seem to have considered, not m erely the w eight o f particular
burdens, but the value o f associated services and, som etim es, the fairness
o f the distribution o f those burdens. T he state, by the eve o f the R evolution,
w as seen as a provider (or at least a potential provider) o f vital serv ices;
the lord, his genuine public role eroded as the state advanced, had seen his
claim s upon the peasants redefined from the costs oí appreciated services
17. Noble embrace of change is, however, quite compatible with a view of the nobility as itself in
large part assimilated to the bourgeoisie. If the theoretical opposition between “bourgeois" and
“aristocrats” is not empirically exemplified by “Third Estate” and “nobility” because the French
nobility had become bourgeois, the theoretical problem posed by noble liberalism collapses. Noble
conservatism (for example, the intransigeance of a minority on seigneurial rights) can be dealt with
by speaking of an incomplete embourgeoisement
Conclusion 573
to parasitism . This pattern explains w hy individual taxes, ecclesiastical

exactions, and seigneurial rights differ from one another in the degree to
which the peasants would consider som e sort o f reform . Am ong taxes,
generally speaking, the indirect taxes, seen as lining the pockets o f the rich
rather than m eeting the needs o f state actions, are about as hopelessly
illegitim ate as the seigneurial rights (see p. 102). And am ong seigneurial
rights, th ose tied to a com m unally valued service tend to attract significant,
if m inority, support for som e sort o f reform m easures (se e p. 110).
Seigneurial cou rts, fo r exam ple, are relatively reform able because som e
sort o f judicial function w as a recognized n ecessity o f village life; after all,
peasants disputed land use with one another as w ell as with lord and state
(see p. 111). And w hy should the peasants p refer the king’s distant and
none-too-reliable ju stice over the nearer, cheaper and (if suitably reform ed)
com petent judgm ent o f one w ho knew w ell the particular com m unity? T he
character o f peasants’ reform proposals depends a good deal on the particu
lar exaction in question. T h ose many dem ands to reform taxation, especially
direct taxation, assum e the existen ce o f a service and concentrate on the
attainment o f equity. T h ose few dem ands for reform ing seigneurial rights
rarely concern such equity issu es; it is a m atter o f assuring the services
(and avoiding the associated d isservices).18
W hen w e com pare the reform strategies o f our different groups, w e are
also struck by how frequently the Third E state endorsed som e sort o f legal
procedure, as in their proposals to support peasant com m unities in lawsuits
as a m echanism to en force desired change (see p. 129). We m ay see here a
harbinger o f years o f conflict to com e, conflicts in which puzzled o r angry
legislators m anaged to convince them selves that the peasants w ere failing
to recognize the generous benefits that they had received , w hile the
peasantry, often rejectin g being sw allow ed up along the legal route, m ounted
thousands o f insurrections (see Chapter 9, pp. 5 4 2 -4 7 ). And until w ell into
1792, one o f the principal w ays in which revolutionary legislators tried to
cop e with rural turbulence w as by altering the term s under which peasant
com m unities or lords could sue each other (see Chapter 8 ).
T h ere are other significant w ays in which the peasant dem ands o f the
spring o f 1789 are echoed in the legislation o f the follow ing August and
M arch. The seigneurial rights for which the peasants w ere m ost likely to
propose m easures other than sim ple abolition included many o f the paym ents
to the lord (see Tables 3 .4 , 3 .6 , and 3 .1 1 ); perhaps this explains in part the
confidence (or at least the hope) o f many legislators that a program
con ceived along the lines o f August 1789 and M arch 1790 m ight actually
achieve sufficient peasant support to be viable. Som e rights w ere slated for
18. A community might, for example, accept the huntingrights but only if it is possible to protect
fields from destruction. See Chapter 3, p. 118.
indem nification, others for outright abolition— and the distinctions adopted
in M arch 1790 w ere rather close to the expressed peasant w ishes o f M arch
1789. We can now recogn ize, how ever, that the peasantry, by M arch 1790,
w ere not as they had been (m e year previously and w ere prepared, in many
parts o f France (see Chapter 7 ), to go on fighting. Certainly, som e sen se o f
the possibility o f a m oderate com prom ise would seem consistent w ith the
view s expressed in the parish cahiers in which significant rural factions opted
for reform , others fo r indem nification, and still others contented them selves
w ith expressions o f hostility w ithout any specific proposal at all (let alone a
radical on e) (see p. 136).
This pattern o f peasant grievances is utterly inconsistent with any notion
o f a m indless countryside, in thrall to either an unthinking tradition o r an
unreflective radicalism . Feasant com m unities seem to have distinguished
carefully am ong rights according to their possible value to the com m unity
(see p. 132) as w ell as the feasibility o f the com prom ise indem nification
p roject (se e pp. 9 0 -9 4 ). Restating som e im portant results from Chapter 2,
w e see that the peasants show ed little interest in the strictly honorific
aspects o f seigneurialism and surprisingly little in the agents o f the lord.
M any grievances, m oreover, appear to have been national in scop e, or, in
any even t, did not specify any region or locality (see p. 136). It seem s likely
that peasants engaged in careful and rational calculations o f costs and
rew ards, right by right; that they had a sen se o f fairness as w ell as burden;
that they had an abstract conception o f a seigneurial system rather than
lim iting their thinking to their ow n, known, particular lord; that they had a
certain acceptance— how ever resignedly that m ight have been— o f state
authority (as indicated by how rare dem ands to abolish the tax system w ere
com pared to dem ands for reform ) (see Table 3 .1 ); that, in short, they had
som e sen se o f public service, o f equity, and o f citizenship. It is, how ever,
also the case that peasant com m unities w ere m ore likely than the elites to
have locally oriented dem ands as w ell as to have nonspecific sou rces o f
resentm ent (see Table 3 .1 ). Plainly, the battles for the hearts and m inds o f
the country people w as still up for grabs at the on set o f the Revolution.
If w e m ay glance ahead for a m om ent at Chapters 5 and 6, w e g et
pow erful supporting evidence from R oger C h arter's com parison o f the rural
cahiers o f one bailliage in 1789 with their p red ecessors' com plaints in 1614
as w ell as from the long-term study o f rural contestation from 1661 to 1789
carried out by the team w orking under Jean N icolas and G uy Lem archand.
We do see a shift in grievances away from the claim s o f the state and tow ard
the claim s o f the lords, but the claim s o f the state are still far m ore
num erous (see p. 266). T he N icolas-Lem archand data show , sim ilarly, that
antiseigneurial even ts w ere only a small proportion o f all riotous action
at their seventeenth-century starting point and that the proportion o f
antiseigneurial even ts was rising late in the Old Regim e (se e p. 264).
Conclusion 575
N onetheless, m ore “traditional” form s o f peasant action— the classic anti

tax rebellions and the eighteenth century’s up-and-com ing subsistence
events— still claim ed the lion’s share. O ther, usually m ore geographically
circum scribed, studies confirm the general picture. Am ong th ese, Cynthia
B outon’s w ork on the changing nature o f subsistence even ts d eserves
special n otice; she show s that, by the 1770s, subsistence actions w ere being
carried out in a w ay that w ent beyond the usual patterns o f m arket invasions
and con voy blockages; in addition to th ese standard form s o f action, peasants
now also m ounted a preem inently rural clu ster o f attacks on producers,
large landholders, prosperous peasants, large-scale tenants and som etim es
even lords and m onasteries. TTiis is a shift away from seeing the state and
its agents as the ultim ate culprits and ultim ate saviors in scarcities; now the
institutions o f civil society w ere accountable and am ong the new actions in
which the com m unity w ent directly to the problem atic points, rather than
called for state intervention, there w ere som e seigneurial targets (see p.
247). All this evidence is clean late in the Old Regim e, an antiseigneurial
shift in w ord and deed occurred in the French countryside, strongly enough
to suggest that our notion o f the “ prerevolution” as a largely elite p rocess is
in need o f som e revision (see p. 335). W hile it is probably fair to say that
w e d o not yet know the full scop e o f this rural and plebeian prerevohition, it
is also clear that it had not gone nearly far enough by the spring o f 1789 to
account, in itself, for the full range and intensity o f the antiseigneurial
insurrections.
In Chapter 3 w e also explored the cahiers o f those one m ight think m ost
likely to defend Old Regim e institutions in general and seigneurial rights in
particular. W hen w e exam ined the noble program at the on set o f revolution,
w e w ere struck not m erely by how open to change they w ere generally, but
that even on the seigneurial rights, w here a significant m inority o f assem blies
took an unyielding stand and an even larger num ber avoided discussion
altogether, there was still a rather significant body o f reform sentim ent, not
w eaker indeed than the reform sentim ent am ong the peasants and urban
notables (se e Table 3 .1 ) The nobles, then w ere about as divided as could
be; indeed, by one m easure, the seigneurial rights w ere am ong the subjects
that exhibited the greatest noble division.19 W hen w e shifted from consider
ing the seigneurial regim e as a w hole to specific seigneurial rights, the study
o f the actions dem anded only reinforced som e o f the conclusions o f Chapter
2. T h ere w as sim ply no interest in defending any elaborate noble hierarchy
(se e p. 84); defen se o f the system , while som etim es couched in term s o f
honor, w as often constructed out o f notions o f property rights (see pp.
19. John Markoff and Gilbert Shapiro, “Consensus and Conflict at the Onset of Revolution: A
Quantitative Study of France m 1789,"AmeriamJournal ofSociology 91 (1985): 43.
7 9 -8 8 ), the very sam e notions w ith which its theoretically m inded opponents
w ere com bating the seigneurial regim e.
A basis for a peasant-bourgeois alliance against “feudalism " existed at the
on set o f revolution, although the w ork o f forging it w as not yet accom
plished. Chapter 4 explores the degree to which the revolutionary n otion(s)
o f that feudalism w ere already present to the assem blies in the spring o f
1789. And ju st as the peasant-bourgeois alliance w as not bom w hole, but
w as m ade, w e saw that the full w eb o f associations o f seigneuriahsm , as
used on August 4 , 1789, w as w ily partly w oven a half-year earlier (n ot to
speak o f what was “feudal" in 1792).
T h ere w as, at the tim e o f drafting o f the cahiers, a sen se am ong the
assem blies o f the Third E state that seigneurial rights belonged in the sam e
discussion as each o th e r in the m ost literal sense, Third E state cahiers that
discussed one right tended to discuss others as w ell (see p. 148). In this
regard the nobility w ere rather different: they tended to think o f tw o groups
o f rights, the honorific on es, which they claim ed to defend, and what I call
here the lucrative on es. N oble discussions o f particular honorific rights
tended to evok e discussions o f other such rights, but did not tend to evok e
discussions o f lucrative rights, and vice versa (see p. 190).
Returning to the Third E state docum ents and searching for w hich oth er
institutions tend to have been treated along w ith seigneurial rights, w e se e
that ecclesiastical exactions w ere associated with seigneurial ones (se e p.
154). Indeed, religious issues generally tended to be m ore discussed in
docum ents in which discussion o f the seigneurial regim e w as m ore exten sive
(see Table 4 .7 ). Taxation on the other hand w as generally not so associated,
although certain specific taxes w ere {franc-fief, centième denier, the royal
corvée, and the aides) (see p. 158). M ore broadly and in brief sum mary w e
find that som e o f the institutions later brought along with seigneurial rights
into the discussion o f “ feudalism ” w ere, while other w ere not, so associated
at the onset o f the Revolution. One very im portant m issing elem ent w as any
derogatory lum ping-together o f the royal and the feudal (se e p. 162). N ot
only, then, w as the alliance o f bourgeois and peasant no m ore than incipient
but anything that could be conceptualized as an antifeudal coalition w ould b e
hard to im agine w ithout further elaboration o f what w as m eant by the
feudalism such a m ovem ent is claim ed to have targeted. W hat the study o f
the cahiers suggests, in other w ords, is that to the extent that there w as
som e m eaningful action participated in significantly by both a peasantry and
a revolutionary bourgeoisie, som e sort o f im portant negotiations o r quasi
negotiations took place after the spring o f 1789; and that to the exten t
that revolutionary discourse conceived o f that alliance as directed against
“ feudalism ,” som e sort o f conceptual elaboration o f that notion took place
after that spring as w ell
But such p rocesses hardly started from zero. T h ere w as a very significant
Conclusion 577
peasant antiseigneuriaUsm in the cahiers and the sam e could be said o f the
Third E state; there also w as a considerable sen se, in the cahiers of the
Third E state, o f the centrality o f the seigneurial regim e. Seigneurial rights
w ere seen , to som e extent, to hinder econom ic grow th; to be an im portant
part o f a regim e o f privilege; to be intim ately linked to the church. T he
nobility, (Hi the oth er hand, did not seem to see the seigneurial regim e at
a ll N ot only did many o f its cahiers say nothing, but th ose that did speak did
not seem to see a w hole, but tw o halves (see p. 190): an honorable part and
an incom e-producing p a rt (W as it a self-destructive conceptualization to
have thus dissociated its ow n sen se o f honor from its incom e?) The incom e-
producing part w as often defended by an expansive notion o f honor and the
honorific part by claim s o f property. T he claim s o f senne immutable hierar
chy, or o f any finely graded hierarchy immutable o r otherw ise, w ere hardly
taken up at alL
Having explored the positions taken at the Revolution’s on set, w e turned
to the ensuing dialogue o f legislators and peasants. In Chapters 5 -7 w e
exam ined the peasant half o f that dialogue: the propensities to undertake
various types o f actum in Chapter 5, the unfolding rhythm s o f con flict in
Chapter 6 and the regional patterns in Chapter 7. Antiseigneurial even ts
proved to be the m ost com m on (m ore than one-third the total) over the
entire tim e span from sum m er 1788 to sum m er 1793. Subsistence even ts
cam e in secon d w ith one-quarter, follow ed by religious even ts, then panics,
counterrevolution, land conflict; only then do w e get to the form erly
flourishing anti-tax even ts. C onflicts over w ages proved to be the least
num erous category in our sam ple (see Table 5 .1 ). It was quite consistent
w ith the cahiers that there w as rem arkably little personal violen ce in
the antiseigneurial even ts,20 consistent w ith how little here is by w ay o f
personification in those docum ents: the lord’s agents w ere far m ore rarely
the subject o f grievance than one m ight w ell have exp ected on the basis o f
the historical literature (see Chapter 2, p. 53). In our tabulations o f rebellion,
w e found that the particular lord him self is also seriously injured far less
often than one m ight have expected given the intensity o f m obilization for
thousands o f incidents. Indeed, personification o f the targets o f peasant
anger seem s to have been generally rather lim ited in other sorts o f con flict
as w efl. (T h e great exception w as the religious dom ain, in which a large
proportion o f all even ts have an individualized clerical target (se e p. 230);
m ight (m e see here som ething o f the primal, perhaps prim itive, character o f
com munal religious identity, to suggest a Durkheimian con jectu re?) This
low general level o f personalization is consistent with an interpretation o f
20. See Ifcble 5.2 and 225-26. (Of course, even if severe injuries resulted from only a small
proportion of events, if there were thousands of events there could stiD be a lot of pain—and
there was.)
the cahiers that sees France’s villagers supporting an abstract conceptualiza

tion o f a social system becom e unjust rather than an aberrantly m alicious
evildoer causing ill.
L et m e stress how small a portion o f revolutionary events w ere con sti
tuted by anti-tax actions (see Table 5 .1 ). W ith all due reservations about the
data, which very likely do understate the exten t o f such even ts (se e pp.
2 3 3 -3 7 ), it appears that paying taxes w as less unpalatable in the revolution
ary years than w as paying seigneurial dues. L et us recall that in light oí the
ease o f tax evasion, the fact that anyone paid taxes at all w as ju st shy o f
m iraculous. Recall again the cahiers, in which taxation, the m ost w idely
discussed o f French institutions, differed profoundly from the seigneurial
rights in that taxation w as, (Hi the w hole, seen as reform able (se e Table
3 .1 ). I contended that the cahiers show a certain acceptance o f the state in
the countryside— and a contrasting intolerance for the further existen ce o f
seigneurial rights; the pattern o f insurrectionary actions revealed in Chapter
5 is consistent with such a view .
The form s o f peasant action w ere variations within known patterns: the
destruction or seizure o f pow er-giving docum ents; sacking the residen ce o f
w rongdoers; the rescu e o f on e’s fellow from the clutches o f authority;
the reappropriation o f usurped rights; severing the enem y’s sacred ties;
redistribution o f resou rces; im posing costs on violators o f com m unity soli
darity. W hile there w ere im portant innovations, ranging from displays o f
particular colors (like Bourbon w hite, for exam ple) to the deploym ent o f
unfamiliar sym bols (such as the m aypole, m ysterious and threatening to
revolutionary elites), for the m ost part these w ere fam iliar-enough routines.
This very fam iliarity, this very drawing on a culturally present tradition, w as
no doubt utterly essential to easy com prehension and ultim ately rapid
diffusion o f insurrectionary form s (se e pp. 2 6 1 -6 4 , and Chapter 7 ). N onethe
less, the deploym ent o f these form s o f action against the lords, in anything
like the concentration reached during the Revolution, w as utterly w ithout
p reced en t T he central thrust o f seventeenth-century risings w as anti
taxation; in the relatively peaceful eighteenth century, subsistence issu es
w ere added as central fo d o f p ro te st In the last prerevolutionary years,
antiseigneurial actions, w hile rising, still lagged far behind. And this picture
is reinforced by the cahiers.
H ow, then, did it com e about that so many peasant insurrections w ere
directed, first and forem ost, at the lords? Chapter 6, on the rhythm s o f
contention, show ed enorm ous m onth-to-m onth variation in the intensity o f
con flict (see Fig. 6 .1 ). T he peak m onth for the entire half-decade w as July
1789 and large num bers o f insurrectionary even ts took place as w ell in
January 1790, April 1792, August 1792, and M arch 1793, w ith lesser peaks
in June 1790 and June 1791. The rapid and radical oscillation in con flict
intensity testifies to the volatile nature o f collective action in risky situations.
Conclusion 579
A s potential participants reevaluated the likelihood o f su ccess and the

likelihood o f danger in light o f insurrectionary developm ents elsew here as
w ell as ever-changing new s from the legislative and local governm ents,
people rapidly m obilized and dem obilized.
Although the overall intensity o f conflict fluctuated w ildly, how ever, one
m ay discern som e clear tem poral patterns in the concentration o f the French
countryside upon particular targets. In the sum m er o f 1788 subsistence
even ts w ere overw helm ingly dominant and antiseigneurial even ts w ere
nearly nonexistent (see Figs. 6.2 [a H d ]). Attacks on the rights o f the lords
began to rise m the late autumn erf 1788. The great spike o f July 1789
was nearly one-third com posed o f antiseigneurial events. By the burst o f
insurrectionary action in the winter o f 1789-90, antiseigneurial events had
becom e the dominant com ponent o f peak periods o f rural mobilization and
remained so through the spring o f 1792. By the wave o f late summer 1792,
how ever, the antiseigneurial focus was beginning to lade: the proportion in
Septem ber 1792, for exam ple, was a little over one-third. Beyond this point,
attacks on the rights o f the lords fell off rapidly: the late fall minipeak was
dominated, as in the early phases o f the Revolution, by subsistence events; the
spring 1793 peak was overwhelm ingly made up erf counterrevolution (see Table
6 .3 ). If any sort o f peasant action can be said to have opened the w ay for
later developm ents, then, it w as the subsistence even ts. But an anti-
seigneurial m ovem ent grew strong and stayed strong until the fall o f 1792.
Chapter 7 took up the spatial dim ension o f the insurrectionary w aves. B y
thinking o f the variations in social, political, and econom ic structures across
the map o f France, it w as possible to assess many o f the claim s that have
been m ade about the social circum stances nurturing peasant insurrection
and, m ore particularly, peasant antiseigneurialism . Thus, the heaviness o f
the hand o f the P aris-centered royal adm inistration w as quite different in the
directly adm inistered pays d’élections from what it w as in the pays d’états
w here som e greater m easure o f autonom y had been preserved in the form
o f Provincial E states. T he pressures and opportunities o f the m arketplace
can be approxim ated by the extent o f m ajor road and navigable river, the
size o f tow ns and the nature o f the local crop s; the m obilizational im pact o f
im m ediate econom ic crisis by variations in the price o f grain; and the like.
We find, in that first spring and sum m er o f Revolution, that indicators o f
both m arket involvem ent and o f state penetration increased the propensity
to insurrection. The long-term p rocesses undermining peasant acquiescence
dear to both M arxists and Tocquevilleans have som e explanatory force and
thereby help us understand som e o f the long-term p rocesses that m obilized
peasants to crack the Old Regim e in the spring and sum m er o f 1789.
Indeed, m arket opportunities seem to have fostered virtually every sort
o f insurrectionary event (see Table 7 .8 ). T he presen ce o f a specifically
antiseigneurial thrust within that m ovem ent o f the early Revolution, how
ever, is less w ell explained by such structural conditions. A s w e m ove

forw ard in tim e, m oreover, d ie explanatory pow er o f th ese particular
enduring structures shifts: antiseigneurial actions w ere no longer prim arily
rooted in the openfield o f the North and East as w ell as the coastal zon es o f
P rovence as they had been in the spring and sum m er o f 1789. M apping the
changing locations o f uprising show s such shifts clearly. A fter that great
w ave o f uprising in the sum m er o f 1789 and the self-con sciou sly epochal
d ecrees o f August, areas o f France not notably m obilized for antiseigneurial
action at first (and som etim es not notably m obilized— at first— for any sort
o f action at all) entered the fray. A t the tail end o f 1789 and the beginning o f
1790, peasants in “ backward” areas like Brittany and the Southw est not
only rose but took on the seigneurial regim e (see Tables 7 .5 and 7 .6 ). O ne
m ight alm ost say that the new antiseigneurial zones w ere quite sim ilar to
the classic regions o f the anti-tax revolts o f the seventeenth century, but
they w ere now rising against a target not generally associated with th ose
regions’ m ore w ell-know n past m ovem ents. The spatiotem poral analysis,
then, reveals som ething o f the structures that nurtured revolts o f various
sorts and perm its us to sift and evaluate som e o f the classical th eses about
what the im portant structural changes w ere. But that analysis also suggests
som e o f the lim its o f a purely structural approach, since the spatial shifts
(Mice again dem onstrate that there are short-term p rocesses at w ork as welL
W e also see how distinctive is each province’s revolution. P rovence, for
exam ple, is both an early and a late cen ter o f antiseigneuriaHsm. And w e
see as w ell that there w as no single geographic cen ter o f insurrectionary
innovation. T he developm ent o f organizational veh icles (National G uards,
political d u b s), sym bolizations (trees o f liberty) or targets m ight rem ain
locally or regionally bound at one point and then be taken up elsew h ere. On
the other hand, if w e consider the entire period our data covers, anti-
seigneurial even ts prove to be am ong the least regionally restricted o f the
form s o f con flict w e have tracked. Legislators groping for sim ple but
effective form ulas to deal with com plex realities m ight w ell find in anti-
seigneurial legislation a key to coping with France’s many different peas
antries.
Peasants, urban elites, and nobles each with their ow n distinct sen se o f
the salient aspects o f the seigneurial regim e and their ow n program s for
change; thousands o f acts o f rural rebellion directed against many distinct
targets— these are the data w e have been studying. H ow did it com e about,
starting from the various positions set forth in 1789, that the pattern o f
insurrection was one increasingly focu sed cm the seigneurial regim e until
deep into 1792 and which the legislators them selves understood as part o f
the overthrow o f som ething called “ feudalism ” ? W hy didn’t the French
peasants rem ain focu sed on taxation and subsistence issues, the central
concern s o f m ost rebellious peasants in the seventeenth and eighteenth
Conclusion 581
centuries for a long tim e now ? Wfe have urged that in part (but only in part)
the answ er lies in structural changes that increased acceptance o f the central
state and decreased the tolerability o f the seigneurial regim e. B eyond this
im portant first step, how ever, this bode has argued that the actions o f
revolutionary peasants and revolutionary legislators opened possibilities for
each other. A s rural com m unities discovered the strengths o f antiseigneurial
sentim ent in the upper Third E state during the electoral cam paign and
within the National A ssem bly during the sum m er o f 1789, they discovered
the great payoff to insisting on legislative progress; after the d ecrees o f
August 4 -1 1 in which many legislators hoped to have found the key to rural
pacification, the seigneurial regim e stood revealed as even m ore vulnerable
and many peasants continued to ignore the proffered d v il peace (se e
Chapter 8 ). U ltim ately the legislature w ent along and yielded in practice to
m uch o f what the country people w ere dem anding: the legislation o f August
1792 yielded in practice to the peasant attacks and the follow ing July the
legislature yielded in principle to the com m onsense m eaning o f abolition o f
feudal rights. For its part the legislators had the m ost diverse m otives in
constructing the August 1789 package: the search for a com prom ise; the
genuine belief in turning history around; the attem pt to recon cile their ow n
pocketbook interest with rem oving a hindrance to social and econom ic
progress; the hope o f satisfying the country people w ithout underm ining the
value o f the royal and church properties that they hoped to sell; the
possibility o f delay through redefining the social m eaning o f August 4
retrospectively by future manipulation o f the term s o f indem nification.
D isappointed, angry, and frustrated that significant peasant m obilization
continued to take place, the legislature continued to tinker with the law (se e
pp. 4 5 0 -6 5 ) w hile at the sam e tim e convincing them selves that feudalism ,
which they claim ed to have abolished, was the central institution o f the Old
Regim e and w as central, too, to the increasingly hostile relations w ith the
other European pow ers. W ith the com m encem ent o f war, the attem pt to
convince them selves that, pending indem nification, som e com bination o f
coercion and persuasion could get French peasants to continue to pay, broke
dow n as the conscription o f French villagers to liberate Belgian and Germ an
villagers from feudalism seem ed an im possible m atter w ithout recognizing
that for French villagers the liberation o f France from feudalism w as as yet
a prom ise; try as they m ight, the legislators had failed to persuade their
ow n villagers that their liberation from feudalism had already been achieved
(see pp. 4 6 9 -7 9 ). Revolutionary legislators encouraged revolt and revolu
tionary peasants forced the legislators to live up to the com m onsense
m eanings o f their ow n rhetoric.
W hile the legislators let the relatively united peasant com m unities push
them m uch further than they had originally intended (Hi seigneurial rights,
on issues m uch m ore divisive within those sam e com m unities (land con flicts
prim arily; w age conflicts w ere relatively sca rce), the legislature never acted
with the darity that obtained— ultim ately— in the seigneurial arena. (Perhaps
the failure o f the sharecroppers’ m ovem ent in the Southw est that d early
em erged after the battle over seigneurial rights was generally w on, is
another good exam ple. Joined with other peasants elsew here, the south
w estern sharecroppers’ tenacious refusal o f the initial revolutionary legisla
tion m ade a significant contribution to the antiseigneurial m ovem ent’s suc
cess. Isolated, later, they obtained much le s s.)21
In the course o f their dialogue with the peasantry the legislators attem pted
a narrow definition o f feudalism, initially exem pting many payments from
immediate and uncompensated abolition on the grounds that such paym ents
w ere inherently based on proper contracts (see Chapter 9). At the same tim e,
the affective pow er o f the daim to have abolished feudalism cam e not from the
joys o f such a delimited abolition, but from an increasingly broad and vague
notion o f feudalism, virtually coextensive with the entire Old Regim e and
thereby part o f the claim to have overturned French history (and to be
fundamentally at odds with the European pow ers w here feudalism still held the
day). It was the simultaneous developm ent o f the narrow and the broad senses
o f “the abolition o f feudalism” that gives the legislators’ talk about feudalism its
special quality: its evidently frequent (though not always) and deeply felt sense
o f having, godlike, brought light w here there had been darkness through the
pow er erf w ords coexisting with a condescension, nervousness, and hostility
toward the country people who wanted changes that w ere meaningful in then:
own lives. The intertwining o f creating a new world and quibbling about
indemnification m odalities, o f the generously grand and the stingily petty gave
these revolutionary debates their special character. In the course o f ultimately
yielding to the countryside, the revolutionaries disseminated one o f their m ost
profound conceptual constructions: the sense o f “revolution” as a willed rupture
o f the fabric o f history, o f a total repudiation o f a past on behalf erf a better
future, an image o f the tim e o f d ie lords as a social order totally overthrown
that has continued to perm eate the polarities o f the past and the present in the
social sciences.
Elites and Plebeians

A s in many other historical episodes o f con flict and change, the R evolution’s
chroniclers have long w restled with the social location erf the im petus for re
creating institutions. D oes the energy for destruction and reconstruction,
perhaps along with the vision to im agine the new , w ell up out o f the popular
21. See Peter M. Jones, The frasantry m the French Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1988), 99-103.
Conclusion 583
classes? O r do those accustom ed to the uses o f pow er seize som e epochal

opportunity to im pose their ow n vision o f social reform ation? The relative
w eights o f the actions and p rojects o f revolutionary elites and French
villagers in dism antling the seigneurial regim e have been variously character
ized. For A lfred Cobban (see p. 594), a M arxist notion o f a bou rgeois-
peasant antifeudal alliance w as doubly nonsensical: first, because the leader
ship o f the Third E state w ere in fact quite conservative on seigneurial
rights. T heir only distinction from the intransigent portion o f the nobility,
in Cobban’s view , w as their clever ploy o f indem nification, a protective
sm okescreen behind which seigneurial rights w ere to continue. In the
secon d place, the notion o f an antifeudal Revolution was nonsensical because
there w as no very meaningful feudalism to destroy to begin w ith. For
G eorge Taylor, on the contrary, there w as not very m uch radicalism
anyw here initially, but to the extent that there w as, it was lodged in the
w orld o f the urban elites and made up no part at all o f rural attitudes.22
A lbert Soboul saw the driving force o f the rural aspect o f the Revolution in
the actions o f peasants them selves,23 particularly insofar as they, along with
the urban popular classes, w ere able to obtain an adequately responsive
governm ent in 1793: “ T he peasant and popular revolution w as at the very
heart o f the bourgeois revolution and carried it steadily forw ard.“24 François
Furet and Ran H alévi, on the contrary, are im pressed by the initial radicalism
o f 1789, seen in large part as a conceptual break with the past (including the
very conception o f a conceptual break), and carried by a bourgeoisie
energized by their vision o f overturning French h istory.25 W hile the radical
ism that interests Soboul is m ost closely realized in 1793, making the
interplay o f Jacobin dictatorship and popular m ovem ents the central thing to
b e explained, Furet and H alévi want us to appreciate, again, that initial
break, and to see the radicalism o f 1789 as deeper (and as a deeper m ystery)
than that o f 1793 (x cv ); that initial radicalism is exhibited centrally in the
language o f legislators, and popular m ovem ents play only an auxiliary ro le .26
It is probable, indeed, that sim ilar debates go (Hi about m ost other
historical m om ents that com bine a great sense o f con flict with a great sense
o f transform ation. If w e m ove away from the discipline o f history to
22. Taylor speaks of the “docility shown by the peasants towards the seigneurial system” in their
cahiers; see his “Revolutionary and Nonrevolutionary Content in the Cahiers of 1789: An Interim
Report,” French HistoricalStudies 7 (1972): 495.
23. “The most active wing of this revolution was not so much the commercial bourgeoisie. . . ,
but the mass of small direct producers whose surplus was seized by the feudal aristocracy with the
fuD support of the judiciary and the means oí constraint available to the state under the Anden
Régime” (Soboul, The French Revolution, 8).
24. “The political instrument of change was the jacobin dictatorship of the lower and middle
section of the bourgeoisie, supported by the popular classes” (ibid).
25. François Furet and Ran Halévi, Orateurs de la Révolution française, vol 1, Les constituants
(Paris: Gallimard, 1989), bcvii-lxxvi.
26. Soboufs masterpiece is, appropriately, Thefízrisian Sans-Culottes in the YearTwo. Nowhere
the social scien ces m ore likely to be self-con sciou sly concern ed w ith the
form ulation o f generalizations, w e can see, in N orth Am erica at any rate, a
curious disciplinary division in em phasis. Until fairly recently, sociology w as
w here social m ovem ents w ere studied: sociologists have devoted great
energy to unearthing the sou rces o f recruitm ent into m ovem ents, the
variety o f w ays in which m ovem ent organizations are structured, the
historical settings within which m ovem ents em erge, the w ays in w hich
m ovem ents organize the lives o f their m em bers, and, to a lesser exten t,
the transform ative effect o f m ovem ent participation chi participants. G iven
notably short shrift, how ever, until quite recently, was anything resem bling
com parable attention to the pow er-holders o f whom those m ovem ents m ade
dem ands.27 Q uite the contrary could be said for the field o f political scien ce:
political scien tists, students o f every nuance o f governm ent, lovingly atten
tive to governm ental organization, the social origins o f governm ent person
nel, the nature o f policym aking and policy im plem entation, the ideologies o f
governing elites and the like, have been alm ost com pletely neglectful o f
social m ovem ents.28 This division o f intellectual labor m eans that alm ost no
one w as studying the interplay o f states and m ovem ents.
But what seem s to em erge from our exam ination o f peasants, lord s, and
legislators is precisely that a great deal o f what propelled the Revolution in
the countryside was the interplay o f peasant and legislator, plebeian and
elite, periphery and cen ter. Peasants and legislators altered their actions in
respon se to the other. A s legislators, for exam ple, attem pted to cop e w ith
the failure o f previous legislation to dem obilize rural activism , they altered
the term s on which disputed cases would be fought out in the cou rts in
order to increase the frequency o f peasant victory in litigation by shifting
the burden o f p roof from peasant to lord (see Chapter 8, p. 465). T h e
peasants, in turn, to pursue this particular m atter, reacted to the increased
significance o f seigneurial docum ents im plied by the shifting burden o f p roof,
not so m uch by m oving into the legal arena, as by becom ing increasingly
prone to seize or destroy those docum ents (see Chapter 8, p. 504). T his
m iniprocess, a small piece o f a m uch larger and richer dialogue, could not
be adequately captured by summarizing it as “ really” a peasant initiative or
a legislative one; both parties took their ow n initiatives with an ey e on
the other’s.
has Furet so imaginatively deployed evidence on behalf of Ms view of the Revolution as in Ms

introduction with Ran Halévi to their collection of revolutionary oratory, just cited. See Albert
Soboul, Les Sans-culottes parisiens en tan II: Mouvementpopulaire etgouvernement révolutionnaire,
2 Juin 1793-Thermidoran II (Paris: Librairie Clavreuil, 1958).
27. To some extent the picture just drawn had been ameliorated by the new focus on “bringing
the state back in.” See Peter B. Evans, Dietrich Rueschemeyer, and Theda Skocpol, Bringing the
State Back In (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985).
28. The great exception is Sidney Tarrow. See, for example, Democracy and Disorder. Protest
andPolitics in Italy. 1965-1975 (Oxford: Clarendon Press. 1989).
Conclusion 585
We see at every turn that the m ovem ent in the villages and the politics o f
the legislatures converged on an increasingly radical antiseigneuriafism .
Mayor w aves o f peasant actions w ere the occasion for antiseigneurial legisla
tion even when the peasant actions w ere not overw helm ingly antiseigneurial
(as in sum m er 1789 and spring 1793). Thus the antiseigneurial propensities
o f the legislators and their ideological construction o f feudalism led them to
deal with peasant problem s by going further in dism antling the seigneurial
regim e. In M arch 1790, perhaps with an eye on the peasant dem ands o f one
year earlier, they w ere tougher on som e seigneurial rights than oth ers; but
the legislative assault on the sym bolics o f noble honor o f June 1790, so
horrifying to the nobles and m oving to the w ell-to-do com m oners, w as far
less im portant to the countryside.29 Peasant rebellion got seigneurial rights
on the legislative agenda, again and again, but w hether the legislators
follow ed the peasant program or not varied a good deal from m om ent to
m om ent Peasant disruption yielded legislative respon ses, but not necessar
ily the respon ses desired. U ltim ately, the legislators, pressed by w ar, began
to take n ote o f the stress o f m aterial burdens, not sym bolics, in the
peasant position.
Students o f social m ovem ents, one m ight com m ent h ere, have som etim es
noted a sim ilar pattern in diverse con texts. E lite actions open the d oor to
social-m ovem ent challengers w ho push the d oor further open still— and
som etim es tear it o ff its hinges altogether; social m ovem ents get issues on
elite agendas; elite actions in dealing with those agendas frequently diverge
from the intentions o f m ovem ent participants.30 We have a dialogue, not
tw o m onologues.
If w e look to the realm o f ideas, w e find again an irredudbly interactive
com pon ent Public positions staked out in the cahiers at the beginning o f the
Revolution w ere altered as the opportunities and constraints changed rap
idly. The cahiers o f the Third E state, even when supplem ented by consider
ing the m ore conservative view s o f the nobility, are a very im perfect
predictor o f the legislation actually drafted by the National A ssem bly (let
alone by subsequent legislatures); the positions staked out by F rance's forty
thousand rural com m unities in the spring o f 1789 are an even less p erfect
predictor o f what the country people would or would not settle for as little
as one year later. W hy not? The cahiers are not a m agic window opening
onto the souls o f peasants or urban notables. T hey are public statem ents,
ham m ered out w ith an ey e cm the possibilities and risks o f the m om ent;31
som e o f those possibilities and risks w ere the sam e one year later, but
29. See Chapters 2-4 on the honorific rights in the cakitrs.

30. Sidney Harrow, Struggle, Politics andReform: CollectiveAction, Social Movements and Cycles
ofProtest (Ithaca: Cornel University Center for International Studies, 1989).
31. See Chapter 2, pp. 26-28; Gilbert Shapiro and John Markoff, Revolutionary Demands: A
ContentAnalysis ofthe Cahiers de Doléances of1789 (Stanior± Stanford University Press, 1997).
many had changed. T he very con cept o f “the feudal regim e,” a m ajor
conceptual tool with which the revolutionary elites interpreted the w orld to
them selves and explained their actions to the w orld, was itself in flux and
m odified in the cou rse o f the interaction o f peasants and legislators.
Is such an entity as a purely peasant or legislative discourse ever conceiv
able? W hen peasants speak or act it is to make an impact on som eone; the
same for legislators. Unless w e adopt som e notion o f purely expressive acts,
with no elem ent o f calculation whatsoever, w e must concede that there is
always an other to whom one speaks, whether the form of that speech is in
grievances, insurrection, legislation. The habits o f discourse are them selves,
m oreover, shaped interactively. We have had many occasions to note the
powerful impact o f a culture o f legal professionalism on both peasants and lords,
not to mention the upper reaches o f the Third Estate. A s com pared to the
cahiers o f 1614 the parish docum ents o f 1789 w ere coherently «tie re d and
em ployed categories at once understandable by the administrative personnel to
whom those late eighteenth-century rural communities had plainly becom e
accustom ed.32 Both peasants at one extrem e and nobles (see pp. 34, 8 4 -8 5 )
at the other em ployed rhetoric in which the language o f contract, property,
voluntary consent, and rational negotiation w ere central. (W s may speculate
whether the nobility’s position was doom ed in advance by its conversion to the
term s o f discourse o f the bourgeois w orld.)
T he village, even in relatively quiet tim es, w as rarely, if ever, a self-
contained w orld. The all too scarce m em oirs o f those w ho had known this
eighteenth-century rural com m unity from within all offer eloquent testim ony
to that e ffe c t P ierre Prion, a dow n-on-his-luck notary’s son w ho took
em ploym ent w ith a Languedodan m arquis in the earlier part o f the century;
M onsieur N icolas, w ho had left the hom e o f his father, a prosperous peasant
risen to seigneurial judge in Burgundy, to becom e the “ Rousseau o f the
gutter” ; the desperately p oor boy w ho escaped the sort o f stepm other w ho
provided the m odel for many a folk-tale, ultim ately to becom e Captain
C oignet in N apoleon’s army— th ey show us a w orld o f villagers com ing and
going, collectively challenging a lord « individually fleeing the recruiting
sergeant, divided in its adherence to France’s rival religious currents, with
an upper stratum im porting urban notions and tastes, appreciative o f those
am ong them versed in the w ays o f law and adm inistration.33
Even the analysis o f the insurrections them selves demands a sense not just
o f the roots o f peasant actions but ci interactions. Conflict is not only, as the
32. Roger Chartier, “Cultures, lumières et doléances: Les cahiers de 1789,” Revu» dkistoire
moderne et contemporaine 28 (1981): 68-93.
33. Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie and Orest Ranum, eds., Pierre Prim, Scribe: Mémoires dm»
écrivain de campagne au XVIIIe siècle (Paris: GaUimard-JuUianl, 1985); Nicolas-Edmé Restif de h
Bretonne, MyFather'sLife (Gloucester. Sutton, 1986); Les cahiers du Capitaine Coignet, 1799-1815
(Paris: Hachette, 1968).
Conclusion 587
phrase goes, as old as history but, Use other quintessentiaDy interactive

phenomena, is virtually incom prehensible without a historical narrative. Like
the tango, conflict is d ie sort o f dung it takes at least tw o to do: one party
attem pts to injure another, to seize som ething from another, to defend itself
from another, to demand that another do som ething (perhaps to or for a third
party). A s the second party responds (and perhaps third, fourth, and other
parties as w ell), the first responds in turn to those responses. The choice
among future actions is made in light o f expectations that draw on past
experience, on the continual rediscovery o f how the other parties react to
one’s ow n actions, on the continual reassessm ent o f tactics and goals. Conflict
exists in tim e as parties interact and, in interacting, change. Conflicts, there
fore, are processes and as processes have histories. The central evidence on
which to develop an understanding o f conflict, then must be historical.
W hen w e note that rural com m unities lived, not in herm etically sealed
com partm ents, but continually interacted with priests, lords, governm ent
adm inistrators, and (hardly the least) law yers, w e are very for from em brac
ing any thesis o f inherent rural incapacity to form ulate their ow n interests.
Just as the evidence o f the cahiers show s considerable nuance in distinguish
ing one tax from the rest, one seigneurial right from the rest, so , too d oes
the shifting ch oice o f targets o f insurrection display a reasoned and continual
réévaluation o f their situation.
In action and reaction, in seizing opportunities and in coping with threats
posed by the other, legislators and peasants m ade the Revolution antisei-
gneuriaL Can one say that the plebeian contribution w as violen ce, the
legislative conceptual? This has been a com m on notion, at first the property
o f the political right as conservative legislators held good country people
seduced by a seditious, educated stratum and later, in the nineteenth
century, appropriated by a left w ho saw a vital role for a theory-bearing
stratum to speak for the voiceless. C onsider the follow ing vivid passage o f
François F u ret "B u t the d ecrees o f August 4 to August 11 num ber am ong
the founding texts o f m odem France. T hey destroyed aristocratic society
from top to bottom , along w ith its structure o f dependencies and privileges.
For this structure they substituted the m odem , autonom ous individual, free
to do w hatever was not prohibited by law. August 4 w iped the slate
clean by elim inating w hatever rem ained o f intrasodal pow ers betw een the
individual and the social body as a w h ole.”34 Since structures w eren’t
"d estroyed ’ in a w eek’s tim e— Furet’s ow n w ork is testim ony to continuity
in political struggle over a century35— this paragraph is m ost plausible as a
statem ent on the level o f conceptualization. T he National A ssem bly can be
34. François Furet, “Niît erfAugust 4,” in François Furet and Mona Ozouf, Critical Dictionary
of theFrench Revolution (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989), 112.
35. François Furet, La Révolution de TurgotàJulesFerry, 1770-1880 (Paris: Hachette, 1988).
credited w ith a new im age o f French society. Even so , this seem s far too
strong: the history o f w om en’s rights show s plainly that even conceptually,
the National A ssem bly did not w holly do away w ith intrasodetal hierarchies;
the free, autonom ous, individual citizens w ere a band o f brothers w hose
w om en w ere still d ep en den t36
Amending Furet to allow m ore weight to the plebeian role, w e seem to have
plebeian violence phis elite conceptualizations as the revolutionary m otor. But
recall how often w e have seen an interplay o f peripheral and central, plebeian
and elite, initiative: in the National Guards, in the diffusion o f Ib ees o f Liberty,
in the locus o f antiseigneurial violence. Why assume that radical lawyers had
the ideas, ideas that ultimately im pressed them selves on a welcom ing or hostile
population? It as Hilton Root has suggested,37 lawyers representing peasant
communities against their lords had forged an antiseigneurial judicial discourse,
was the direction o f influence only from lawyer to peasant community? This
seem s a dubious proposition, if perhaps not quite so dubious as a notion o f a
pristine peasant community, unaffected by legal/administrative contexts. This
would be to follow the legislators in seeing the action o f intellect in M erlin’s
distinctions and ignorance in those erf southwestern sharecroppers, violence in
the actions o f the sharecroppers and not in those erf M erlin and his fellow
legislators. The writing o f history tends to quote the w ords o f the legislators
m ore than the words o f the sharecroppers, but that tells us nothing about the
ultimate sources o f ideas and practices. The evidence presented here is that
the abolition o f seigneurial rights was a com plex process, and a collective, but
not a consensual, one, that grew from differences betw een village and legisla
ture (and differences among villages and among legislators) as much as it grew
by convergence, commonality, diffusion.
T here are tw o im portant, opposed challenges to this picture o f plebeian/
elite dialogue that still need som e com m ent: first, the charge, quite com m on
in the 1990s, that the plebeian violen ce was but a tragic sideshow in a
history prim arily driven by elite reform . The secon d, the view that the elite
reform w as nothing but a fraud.
Did It Matter?
In the sum m er o f 1989, heads o f state gathered in France to participate in
the celebration o f the Revolution’s Bicentennial.38 Since the revolutionary
36. Carol Pateman, The Sexual Contract (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988); Lynn A.
Hunt, The Family Romance of the French Revolution (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of
California Press, 1992).
37. Root, Peasants andKing in Burgundy:Agrarian Foundations ofFrenchAbsolutism (Berkeley
and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1987), 183-93.
38. This section draws onJohn Markoff, "Violence, Emancipationand Democracy: The Country
side in the French Revolution,’’Ammcan HistoricalReview 100 (1995): 360-86.
Conclusion 589
even ts w ere so divisive and still capable o f providing touchstones for all that
continued to divide France’s left, right, and cen ter, the consensus-prom oting
governm ent o f François M itterrand ch ose to stress the them e o f the
Revolution’s im pact cm the w orld. Britain’s M argaret Thatcher, irritated at
the torren t o f French self-congratulation for having been a w ellspring o f
liberty in the w orld, rem arked that her country played at least as significant
a role in liberty’s history and w ithout having undergone one o f those nasty
revolutions.39 This earned her a public history lesson from C hristopher Hill
w ho rem inded her o f England’s ow n seventeenth-century upheaval.40
ito o hundred years after the Revolution, it was not only a British prim e
m inister w ho doubted that plebeian violen ce had contributed to human
advance. M any a historian w as w ondering the sam e thing, and in one or
another form w as elaborating the ironic point o f Thatcher that social
progress had not only not required revolutionary violen ce but w as retarded
by it T he trickle o f dissent from what Cobban and Taylor in the 1960s and
1970s had taken as the celebratory orthodoxy o f the political left becam e,
by the late 1980s, a flood tide o f debunking. The Revolution’s effects w ere
now seen as perverse (as in the claim that far from elim inating barriers to
French econom ic advance, the Revolution so dam aged the French econom y
as to augm ent the already developing British lead and thereby ensure British
econom ic dom inance)41 or nonexistent (as in the claim that the advances
often attributed to the Revolution w ere actually being carried out by the
reform ing elites o f the Old Regim e to begin w ith ).42 And when there w ere
results w orthy o f resp ect, these w ere increasingly held to have been carried
primarily by m utations in elite political culture rather than by m ass action.43
39. ¿¿Mm*(July 13,1969): 1.

40. Christopher HB, "Mrs. Thatcher set to rights," Guardian (July 15,1989).
41. François Crouzet, De ¡a supériorité dt rAngleterresur la France: L’économique et Fimaginaire,
XVlIe-XXsticks (Paris: Librairie Académique Perrin, 1985), esp. 248-98; Pierre Chaunu, Legrand
déclassement A propos dune commémoration (Paris: Laffont, 1989), 265-84; René Sédilot, Le coût
de la Révolution (Paris: Librairie Académique Perrin, 1987).
42. From Simon Schama’s preface to Citizens: “The drastic social changes imputed to the
Revolution seem less dear-cut or actually not apparent at alL The ‘bourgeoisie’ said in the classic
Marxist accounts to have been the authors and beneficiaries of the event have become social
zombies, the product of historiographical obsessions rather thanhistorical realities. Other alterations
in the modernizationof French society and institutions seem to have been anticipated by the reform
of the ‘old regime.’ ” See Schama, Citizens:A Chronicle oftheFrenchRevolution (New York: Vintage
Books, 1990), xhr.
43. For surveys at this recent literature, see Sarah Maza, “Politics, Culture and the Origins of
the French Revolution,” Journal of Modem History 61 (1989): 704-23, and Jack Censer, “The
Coming of a New Interpretation of the French Revolution," Journal of Social History 21 (1987):
295-309. The Bicentennial became an occasion for the expression of these issues, a theme
magnificently developed in Steven Laurence Kaplan, FarewellRevolution, DisputedLegacies: France,
1789/1989 (Ithaca: Cornel University Press, 1995), and FarewellRevolution, The Historians’ Feud:
France, 178911989 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995).
L et us look at the questions being raised in the specific instance o f the

seigneurial rights. Did the Revolution benefit peasants? T he Revolution’s
im pact on the people o f the countryside is com plex, contradictory, and not
fully known: im portant changes occu rred in landholding, taxation, local
governm ent, m arket outlets, inheritance law, dem ography, the role o f the
church, judicial institutions, and patterns o f deferen ce that, even if fully
researched, would defy ready sum m ary.44 For the seigneurial rights consid
ered alone, how ever, it seem s clear that the principal beneficiaries w ere
peasant proprietors w ho had ow ed the lord periodic paym ents and m utation
fees; but tenants and laborers would seem to have benefited along with
peasant ow ners from the ending o f tolls, com pulsory labor, m onopolies,
pigeon- and rabbit-raising and hunting rights not to m ention the innum erable
affronts to dignity. We m ay dism iss the charge that the Revolution’s accom
plishm ents, cm the w hole, w ere in this area nonexistent o r dow nright
p erverse;45 w e need, how ever, to address the question o f w hether the
Revolution, and popular m obilization in particular, w as in som e sen se a
n ecessary part o f dism antling the seigneurial regim e. N ot only m ight a
debunker point to the pre-revolutionary beginning m ade by the king in
abolishing serfdom on royal holdings (see Chapter 9, p. 549), but, far m ore
pow erfully, one could point to the very elaborate antiseigneurialism in the
cahiers o f the Third E state.
W as a m ore peaceful term ination o f seigneurial rights, carefully controlled
by a forw ard-looking elite, im aginable? Such a question dem ands erf us that
w e try to speculate about the consequences o f an elite-driven antiseigneurial
p roject pursued w ithout the threat o f effective peasant disruption. Such
counterfectual speculation is fraught with no end o f hazards. In this particular
case, how ever, w e have som e im portant parallel experiences to draw on if
w e look eastw ard at other European p rojects for the rem oval o f broadly
sim ilar rights. E lite desires to partially or w holly dism antle antiseigneurialism
drew on many sou rces apart from fears o f rebellion: the conviction that
agricultural productivity could be advanced, that state revenues w ould
increase, that an em ancipated peasantry w as m ore reliable in w artim e, that
44. For recent statements of the issues, see Jones, Peasantry, 248-70; Timothy J. A. LeGoff
and Donald M. G. Sutherland, "The Revolution and the Rural Economy,” in Ahn Forrest and fteter
M. Jones, eds., Reshaping France: Town, Country and Region During the French Revolution
(Manchester Manchester University Press, 1991), 52-85.
45. But we ought by no means to dismiss the charge that the benefits varied profoundly from
region to region and that peasants in some regions may have been more jqjured by tax equalization
than they were helped by ending seigneurial claims. See the case made by Donald Sutherland in The
Chouans: The Social Origins ofPopular Counter-Revolution in UpperBrittany, 1770-1796 (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1982), 8-9, 134-43. This would be particularly true of tenants who benefited hr
less than proprietors from the ending of seigneurial rights and tithes, particularly since demographic
pressures probably permitted landlords to raise rents and thereby gam a good part of whatever
extra resources the abolition of seigneurial rights potentialy left in the tenants’ hands.
Conclusion 591
a civilized country such as one hoped to feel one belonged to required a

juridical com m itm ent to personal freedom and that at least som e seigneurial
claim s co st m ore to extract than they w ere w orth even to the seigneurs.
We have seen that French elites did have an antiseigneurial program at the
on set o f revolution, although one w ell short o f what many French villagers
would a cce p t It is, then, conceivable that there w ere rural em ancipations
elsew here pushed by elite reform ers in which fear o f rural plebeians w as
m inim al C onceivable, but did it happen? Anyw here?
Jerom e Blum 's com parative survey o f the form al em ancipations o f conti
nental E urope’s rural populations show s that alm ost everyw here it w as a
protracted p rocess.46 T h ree states preceded F rance.47 Savoy’s duke freed
his ow n serifs in 1762 and w ent beyond the later sim ilar act o f Louis XV I by
decreein g an indem nified redem ption for other peasants. In 1772 the
indem nification term s w ere altered in favor o f the peasants, but the incapac
ity o f the country people to buy their freedom led the p rocess to drag on
until the French arm y entered tw o decades later and ordered an im m ediate
and unindem nified abolition.48 Baden’s initial proclam ation dates from 1783,
but seigneurial claim s did not definitively end until 1848.49 A fter a series o f
false starts going back as early as 1702, Denm ark proclaim ed an effective
abolition in 1788, but did not com plete the p rocess until 1861.50
Em ancipations hardly proceeded any m ore rapidly in those many instances
in w hich reform began in the wake o f the Revolution. A few princes in
w estern Germ any announced preem ptive reform s as early as the fall o f
1789.51 Em ancipation d ecrees w ere issued in Prussia, W ürttem berg,
M ecklenburg, Bavaria, and H esse betw een 1807 and 1820 but the p rocesses
w ere not com pleted until the revolutionary w ave o f 1848. Still other
46. Given the extreme variety of rights lords held over peasants, there is ambiguity in defining
just which measure should be taken as initiating effective emancipation (does one date France’s
process from the decree ef August 4-11, 1789, for example, or from the king’s limited abolition of
serfdom on his own holdings in 1779?). The ambiguities of dating the end points of emancipation is
even more hazardous: many emancipatory processes trailed off with monopoly rights or tods or
sometimes other claims stdl aMve and wed, for example. As a guide through these and other
difficulties in comparative observation I have largely relied on Blum.
47. One might also wish to indude as a fourth instance the Swiss canton of Sohithum, which
freed ad serfs without indemnities in 1785, but I have not been able to learn anything of the
circumstances in which this enactment took place, nor of its consequences.
48. Max Bruchet, L'abolition des droits seigneuriaux en Savoie (1761-1793). (Annecy: Hérisson,
1906).
49. Blum, The End of the Old Order m Rural Europe (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1978), 386.
50. Ibid., 219-20, 385-86. Unmarried male servants could not leave their employer until 1840
and even then only if they were over twenty-eight years old.
51. In Nassau-Saarbrücken and Saarwerden, tithes, corvées, and hunting monopolies were
abolished. See Eberhard Weis, "Révoltes paysannes et citadines dans les états allemands sur la rive
gauche du Rhin, de 1789 à 1792,” Francia 3 (1975): 354.
em ancipatory p rocesses did not even com m ence until the pressures o f the
agitated early 1830s as in H annover or Saxony and others awaited the still
m ore intense pressures o f 1848 as in Austria, Saxe-W eim ar, and Anhalt-
D essau-K öthen (Austrian officials w ere keenly affected by a Galician revolt
in 1846).52 All o f these em ancipations outside France involved indem nifica
tions. M any w ere lim ited to som e but not other peasants. Denm ark’s 1788
law, for exam ple, did not free serfs betw een fourteen and thirty-six years
old; its 1791 law denied landless farm w orkers the right to seek other
em ploym ent53 Som e o f these indem nified em ancipations required the con
sent o f both lord and peasant, which enabled these lords w ho w ished to
retain their rights to do so, at least until, as invariably happened, subsequent
legislation rem oved the voluntary elem en t54 The rapidity o f the French
transition from a p rocess in large part indem nificatory to on e that w as
thoroughgoingiy abolitionist stands out as utterly unique am ong all European
cases that com m enced prior to 1848.
Apart from Savoy, Baden, and Denm ark, m oreover, the initial im pulse fo r
all the pre-1815 cases w as French. French arm s som etim es brought varying
d egrees o f rural em ancipation as in Belgium at the very start o f the long
war, the H elvetic Republic, and various w estern Germ an states in 1798, the
Grand D uchy o f Warsaw in 1807, and various north Germ an states in 1811;
th ese actions in turn m ight trigger preem ptive em ancipation by fearful
neighbors as in a num ber o f Germ an instances in 1807. Som e o f the oth er
pre-1848 cases, m oreover, w ere hardly independent exam ples, to say the
le a st T he know ledge o f the dangers o f revolution in which French peasants
instructed the w orld certainly helped spur som e o f the nineteenth-century
ca ses.55 And in 1848 itself insurrectionary peasants m ay have m ore rapidly
w on con cession s in Germ an-speaking lands because many governm ents felt
that they had learned from 1789 to 1793 the futility o f half-m easures in the
countryside: thus the term ination o f several decades-long em ancipatory
p rocesses and the com m encem ent and rapid com pletion o f oth ers in
1848-49. (In Hungary in 1848, the D iet appears to have been panicked into
abolishing serfdom by a false report o f 40,000 m obilized peasants.)56 In
other w ords, in central and w estern Europe through the m id-nineteenth
52. Blum, End ofthe OldOrder, 364.

53. Ibid., 384-85.
54. Ibid., 406.
55. This is not to deny that, at points, elites made fearful by the French example may wdl have
delayed or aborted emancipation processes. In Austria, for example, the French Revolution further
energized a conservative current that was already successfully combating the reforms of Joseph D.
See Ernst Wangermann, FromJoseph II to theJacobin Dials: GovernmentPAicy andPublic Opinion
in the Habsburg Dominions m the Period of the French Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1969).
56. G. Spira, “La dernière génération des serfs de Hongrie: l’exemple du comitat de Rest,”
Annales: Economies, Sociétés, Civilisations 23 (1968): 353-67.
Conclusion 593
century there are many instances o f elite-driven reform s but not a single
one that actually cam e to com pletion w ithout the presen ce o f the French
arm y in its revolutionary or N apoleonic form s, the sp ecter o f popular
insurrection, or both.
I think w e are chi fairly strong ground in asserting that w ithout the
determ ined, violent, and frightening popular battle, French peasants w ould
still have been responsible for seigneurial obligations at the m iddle o f the
nineteenth century— at the very le a st If w e consider the role o f popular
uprising in prom pting the initial d ecrees o f August 4 -1 1 , 1789, in the first
place, <me m ight w ell w onder if one could be sure that any seriou s
em ancipation w ould even have taken place at a ll Even the positions taken
in the Third E state cahiers o f the spring o f 1789 w ere surely taken w ith an
aw areness o f the riots rising in the French countryside; the assem blies,
m oreover, although dom inated by urban notables, had a significant num ber
o f village delegates. T he positions taken in the Third E state cahiers already
reflect rural pressures.
Looking beyond France in an even m ore speculative vein, there seem s
som e reason for doubting that many o f the em ancipations in the 1831-32
and 1 8 4 8 -4 9 w aves w ould have taken place nearly so rapidly w ithout the
prior historical experien ce o f France in the 1790s. T h ese cases only
term inated in 184 8-49 because o f the fear o f upheaval— but w ould that fear
have been so great w ithout the experience o f France’s revolutionary decade
and the consequent belief in the pow er o f an alliance o f liberal reform ers and
violent popular forces to tear the fabric o f national history? T he other
European pow ers, when triumphant over French arm s, som etim es show ed
an acceptance o f the French definition o f the international struggle as a w ar
over feudalism by attem pting to undo the em ancipatory reform s, as in
H annover, H esse-C assel, or the N apoleonic Kingdom o f W estphalia.87
Things not only w ent m uch faster in France than elsew here, but the
term s ultim ately adopted w ere substantially m ore favorable to the peasants.
T he long period in oth er countries during which indem nification w as the rule
m eant that m ore peasants actually paid out an indem nity. In som e cases
peasants did not fully obtain the land they had w orked: In Prussia, for
exam ple, peasants exchanged part o f their land for freedom from seigneurial
obligations w hile in Denm ark, "freed ” peasants w ere not turned into proprie
tors but into ren ters.558 O utside o f France, particularly in regions beyond the
7
easy reach o f French arm ies, freedom from dues did not necessarily coincide
57. Ibid., 362. The most interesting such restoration attempt was in the Austrian-occupied
portion of northern France in 1793-94. Under the merely half-hearted support of the Austrian
army, lords and ecclesiastics attempted to collect, but were largely stymied by peasant evasion of
payment; see Georges Lefebvre, Les paysans du Nord pendant la Révolution française (Paris:
Armand Coin, 1972), 551-55.
58. Blum, End ofthe Old Order, 398-99.
w ith a thoroughgoing assault on all seigneurial rights nor w ith a gen eric
attack (xi privilege. Lords often could continue their econom ic m onopolies,
retain their judicial and police authority, and enjoy their tax exem ptions even
after em ancipatory d e c re e s ."
Is there any plausibility to the notion that rural popular violen ce accom
plished nothing that w asn't com ing anyway? To the exten t that w e can
speculate about alternate w orlds on the basis o f evidence about what
happened in our w orld, it look s as if exactly the opposite w as the case: the
em ancipation o f the countryside from the lords in the first half o f the
nineteenth century— not ju st the French but the w est and central European
countryside generally— looks m uch less likely w ithout the half-decade o f
uncontrollable rural uprising in France. Indeed, given the extent to w hich
the lords o f France w ere adapting “ feudal” claim s to the developing m arket
place, it is not obvious that w ithout the popular insurrection that joined the
forces o f its greatest victim s to the reform ing dream s o f the elites, there
ever w ould have been any n ecessity to totally abolish seigneurial rights.
Lords could “ m odernize” their operations and w ere doing so. E lite-driven
reform efforts, in short, w ould have been inadequate in France w ithout the
fear o f popular insurrection and probably in m uch o f w estern and central
E urope as w ell.5
60
9
Was There Only a Popular Revolution?

A Note on a Thesis of Cobban
François Furet has devoted som e energy to m aking sure that w e give
proper recognition to the elite com ponent in forging a revolution; that w e
see, in particular, the genuinely revolutionary character o f the d ecrees o f
August 4 -1 1 , even in their m ost conservative aspect in which dues are
indem nified.61 H e argues that the hold on scholars o f the socialist critique o f
bourgeois individualism is such that “ the rupture o f the bourgeois revolution
59. Ibid., 406-17. The formal retention of such rights, however, must be contrasted with the
capacity of France’s rural elites to find ways to continue such practices m effect despite their
apparent termination in law. In other words, the comparison of legislation alone may exaggerate the
relative advantages gained by French country people over those further east See Abert Soboul,
“Survivances ‘féodales’ dans la société rurale du XIXe siècle," Annales: Economies, Sociétés,
Civilisations 23 (1968): 965-86.
60. As late as the 1870s, the seigneurial rights could Stil be «magmed vividy enough that
republican politicians courted peasant votes by playing on their fears of a revival. See Sanford
Elwitt, The Making of the Third Republic: Class and fblitics in Rural France, 1868-1884 (Baton
Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1975), 76.
61. Furet, “Night of August 4,” 112.
Conclusion 595
is devalued by com paring it to the rupture that rem ains to be carried out,
that o f the truly social révolu tion .'’62 Furet then goes on to m ake an
im portant case for the significance o f August 4, presum ably challenging
belittling M arxists for whom the liberal revolution is but a step on the w ay
to (and a forerunner o f) the real revolution to com e. It is not, how ever, any
M arxist w ho elaborated the m ost influential critique o f the thesis o f a
significant bourgeois participation in an antifeudal m ovem ent, but the very
anti-M arxist A lfred Cobban. For Cobban, far m ore than for the M arxists
both he and Furet attack, the rural revolution w as overw helm ingly a
peasant affair.
Cobban caused a stir tw o and a half decades ago when he proposed, in
the cou rse o f a provocative critique o f what he took to be the prevailing,
M arxist conception o f the Revolution, several surprising reinterpretations.63
In attacking the claim that the French Revolution w as a w atershed in the
triumph o f a m odem bourgeois order over the feudal past, Cobban asserted:
MIf 'feudalism ’ in 1789 did not m ean seigniorial rights, it m eant nothing.”646 5
M oreover, he argued, the attack on seigneurial rights w as not a bourgeois
p roject at a ll “ T he abolition o f seigniorial dues w as the w ork , o f the
peasantry, unwillingly accepted by the m en w ho drew up the tow n and
bailliage cahiers, and forced on the National A ssem bly through the fear o f a
peasant re v o lt It follow s that the 'overthrow o f feudalism by the bourgeoisie’
takes on very m uch the appearance o f the m yth I suggested it w as in a
lecture som e eight years a g o.”66 T he upper reaches o f the Third E state—
including m em bers o f the National A ssem bly and, m ost particularly, the
m em bers o f the Com m ittee on Feudal Rights— w ere, he contended, fre
quently seigneurs them selves, with the m ost urgent m aterial interests in
retaining the system and in only giving in to peasant rebellion as grudgingly
as possible. Cobban’s thesis is im portant, for it is a serious challenge to the
notion that a revolutionary elite, im bued with antifeudal notions, join ed
forces with peasant m ilitants in dism antling the seigneurial regim e. Cobban
denies the Third E state any antiseigneurial view s to speak o f and he denies
that the legislatures engaged in meaningful antiseigneurial legislation excep t
insofar as they w ere pushed by rural insurgents.
Although there certainly is a case for dilatory tactics in the National
62. Furet and Halévi, Orateurs de la Révolution, bocriv.

63. The Social Interpretation of the French Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1965) and several articles collected in Aspects of the French Revolution (New Ybrk: Norton, 1968):
“The Myth of the French Revolution.” 90-111; “Political versus Social Interpretations of the French
Revolution,” 264-74; and “The French Revolution: Orthodox and Unorthodox Interpretations,"
275-87.
64. Cobban, SocialInterpretation, 35.
65. Ibid., 53. The lecture Cobban refers to is “The Myth of the French Revolution.”
rru?
«KJD THE ABOLITION OF FEUDALISM
A ssem bly, for years o f obfuscation and foot-dragging,66 Cobban’s portrait,

our data show , is oversim ple to the point o f total distortion. A glance at the
tables com paring the actions dem anded by the Third E state and nobility67
show s beyond question that the urban notables w ere not by any stretch o f
the im agination com m itted to the integral m aintenance o f the system . W here
the nobles w ere either silent or defensive, the Third E state w as vocal and
on the attack. Am ong Third E state cahiers discussing m onopolies on oven s
and w inepresses, com pulsory labor services, the right to raise rabbits,
serfdom , seigneurial tolls, and the seigneurial courts a m ajority called for
uncom pensated abolition. This is very far from nothing, no m atter how one
interprets the push for indem nification. And if one lodes beyond the cahiers,
to the foot-dragging o f the legislatures, it w as not prim arily in th ese areas
that the feet dragged, but in the area o f paym ents to the lords. T he
m onopolies, the tolls, the anim al-raising, the hunting m onopoly, and the
cou rts did in fact go rather fa s t If indem nification w as a sm okescreen for
those afraid to call fo r m aintenance, it w as a sm okescreen that only covered
a part o f the seigneurial com plex. A very im portant part, to be sure; but it is
extrem ely m isleading to identify the indem nification proposals as a spirited, if
covert, defen se o f the w hole system . And if the Third E state’s attack w as
m arkedly w eaker than that o f the peasants, they w ere notably even m ore
vocal: less likely to abolish, but m ore likely to discuss at alL
Cobban’s sum mary claim w ith regard to “ the m en w ho drew up the
cahiers in the tow ns and the m em bers o f the tiers état in the National
A ssem bly” is that “ there can be no doubt o f their opposition to the abolition
o f seigneurial dues and rights. ”68 On the contrary, there can be the gravest
o f doubts. T h ey w ere, after all, m ore likely to propose abolition than they
w ere indem nification (see Table 3 .1 ). That a portion, even (perhaps)® a
large portion, o f the urban notables enjoyed seigneurial rights d oes not
m ean that they did not have other interests as w ell, in particular, an
ideological com m itm ent to freein g the m arket in land and labor.70 T h eir 6 0
9
8
7
66. For partisans of the legislation of March 1790, what to some seems “foot-dragging” was the
sacred defense of property and the claim erfobfuscation is merely the ignorant failure to understand
Merlin’s clarifications. See Chapters 8 and 9.
67. See Tables 3.1 and 3.4. For another critique of Cobban’s evidence, by Gilbert Shapiro, see
Shapiro and Markoff, RevolutionaryDemands, chap. 14.
68. Cobban, Social Interpretation, 43.
69. I am unable to see that Cobban presents any evidence on the frequency with which these
urban notables were seigneurs, nor do I know of any that is definitive. This is not even to raise the
question of what role seigneurial income played in the total wealth of those deputies of the
Third Estate who were lords. Recent prosopograpUcal work by Timothy Tackett (Becoming a
Revolutionary: The Deputies of the NationalAssembly and the Emergence ofa Revolutionary Culture
(1789-1790) [Princeton; Princeton University Press, 1996]) is both suggestive and makes one wary
of any claim, like Cobban’s, of certain knowledge of this important matter.
70. The bearing of this commitment on proposals about the seigneurial regime was treated in
Chapters 2 and 4.
Conclusion 597
personal stake in the system com plicated their position71 and no doubt w as
a part o f the foot-dragging, but it can hardly explain a full-scale defen se o f
seigneurial rights (which they never m ounted). The indem nification p roject
that distinguishes the cahiers o f the Third E state from the others w as indeed
precisely a m agnificent vehicle to reap the advantages o f abolishing the
system at the sam e tim e as profiting from one’s personal stake in that
system . But if the strength o f support for indem nification separates the
urban notables from the peasants, it hardly identifies them as defenders o f
the system . A s w e saw in Chapters 8 and 9, both the indem nification option
in particular and the overall structure o f the National A ssem bly's actions in
general w ere as far from the m ore intransigent positions o f som e o f the
noble deputies as they w ere from the desires o f peasant com m unities that
continued in rebellion past the sum m er o f 1789. A study o f indem nification
in practice in Charente-Inférieure, for exam ple, confirm s the lack o f noble
enthusiasm for indem nification. A clear m ajority o f seigneurs, approached
with the legally mandated offer, either refused to accept it or avoided being
found and served with legal docum ents.72 In other w ords, faced with
the actual legislation, the behavior o f the seigneurs show s clearly that
indem nification was not their position.
O pposition to indem nification is also dem onstrated in the reaction to
P ierre-François B on cerf’s attack on the seigneurial regim e. B on cerf had
71. There were more impersonal stakes as well that Cobban ignores: the desire for order in the
countryside held by some to be best served by an inflexible attitude on peasant demands; the
financial state of the government With regard to the latter, a report to the National Assembly on
March 28, 1790, from the Committee on Feudal Rights shows a concern for the sale of royal and
church property—a central element in the struggle to solve the financial crisis that precipitated the
Revolution—whose value was deaity affected by the terms on which attached seigneurial rights
could be indemnified (4P12:39). In the discussions of the negative consequences of the law of July
17, 1793, one important issue was the reduction of the value of National Property; see Philippe
Sagnac and Pierre Caron, Les comitts des droits féodaux et de législation et rabolition du régime
seigneurial (1789-1793) (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1907), 787-88, 789-90. Whüe an interest in
public revenues may help explain the lack of enthusiasm of revolutionary legislators for uncompen
sated abolition, this is rather remote from the private financial concerns that Cobban sees as their
central motivation.
72. Jean-Noël Luc, “Le rachat des droits féodaux dans le département de la Charente-Inférieure
(1789-1793),” in Albert Soboul, Contributions à fhistoirepaysanne de la Révolutionfrançaise (Paris:
Editions Sociales, 1977), 318. The seigneur’s "absence” half the time strikes one as a continuation
into the revolutionary era of the noble abstention so striking in the cahiers (see Chapter 2). Those
seigneurs who actually went on record, moreover, as refusing to accept the terms offered were far
more numerous than those who agreed not to contest the idemnity offer. This is also consistent
with the cahiers. The seigneurs also mounted an effective passive resistance against attempts to
indemnify them in Franche-Comté; see Jean MiUot, L’abolition des droits seigneuriaux dans le
département du Doubs et la région comtoise (Besançon: Imprimerie MiDot Frères, 1941), 174-76. It
was not only peasants, but lords as well who waged an effective campaign to undermine the
revolutionary laws. Peasants resisted by not paying as well as by attacking the châteaux; lords
resisted by avoiding being served legal documents, as well as organizing counterrevolution.
urged indem nification at a rate far meure generous than provided in d ie later
revolutionary legislation.73 H e devoted m uch effort to persuading the lords
that his schem e w as in their in terest not only would they be generously
com pensated, but the endless financial drain o f supervision, record s, sur
veys, and the unending litigation would be w iped o u t 74 In spite o f the
reasoned argum ent and the generous term s, neither the hostility o f the
parlement of Paris to this w ork nor the failure o f the noble cahiers to espou se
its argum ents suggests that the seigneurs w ere at all persuaded. Yet Cobban
would have us identify the indem nification policy o f the National A ssem bly
(far less generous than what B on cerf’s sketchy proposal had offered ) as a
cam ouflage for seigneurial in terest Certainly the nobles o f Q uesnoy did not
see this option as a veiled defen se o f seigneurial interests when they
observed: “ Involuntary indem nification, that is to say, what is not done by
the free ch oice o f the p ossessor o f any rights w hatsoever, is every bit as
m uch an encroachm ent on property” (A P 5:504).
N or did the assem bly o f the Third E state o f Poitou seem aware that they
w ere supporting the seigneurial regim e w hen they proposed, with the m ost
obvious reluctance, to indem nify the current p ossessors o f rights they
plainly held loathsom e. This indem nification project was to o m uch for the
thirty-tw o delegates w ho appended their denunciation o f the m ajority to the
cahier: “ to reverse the social order instead o f establishing it, to attack
property instead o f defending it, to seek in appearance the peace that is so
desired w hile fanning the flam es o f discord, would be to substitute licen se
for liberty and agitation for patriotism " (A P 5:415).
Since Cobban’s w ould-be dem olition o f the M arxist interpretation o f the
bourgeois-peasant alliance against feudalism (identified by Cobban with
Soboul’s version) w as so influential and becam e one o f the inspirations for a
large num ber o f scholars w ho feel confident that an old saw has now been
overthrow n, it is w orth pausing over som e o f the fundamental flaws in
Cobban’s argum ent Cobban could equate indem nification with m aintenance
only because he never com pared the noble cahiers with the Third E state
cahiers; only because, within the Third E state cahiers, he failed to distinguish
one right from another; and, only because, underlying these tw o weak
n esses, he had a habit o f making quasi-quantitative statem ents w ithout
actually counting anything.
In arguing that the Third E state notables w ere not pushing for the
dism antling o f the system , Cobban argues that “ a further indication o f the
attitude o f the tow ns is to be found in the fact that there was one seigneurial
73. The rates of indemnification under discussion kept getting more favorable to the peasants.
Boncerf’s pamphlet of 1776 proposed 50 or 60 times their annual value, the duke d’Aiguiflon
suggested 30 times on August 4, 1789, and the rate established in May 1790 was 20 to 25,
depending on the particular right; see Pierre-François Boncert Les mamotmens des droitsftodcatx
(London: Valade, 1776), 11: AP 8:344; AP 15:365-66).
74. Boncerf, Inconvémens des droitsféodaux, 11,12,26, 52.
CAA
Conclusion 0îJSJ
right, if it can be called such, which they com m only opposed. But this w as
franc-fief, and it w as a paym ent not to the seigneur but to the crow n, due
after land that was part o f a fief passed from noble into non-noble p osses
sion .” 75 N ow it is perfectly correct that the droit defranc-fief, a royal tax, is
discussed by m ore cahiers o f the Third E state (72% ), than any o f the
seigneurial rights w e have been exam ining. We w ould suggest that to insist
that an institution be taken up by alm ost three-quarters o f the cahiers b efore
w e speak o f it as “ com m only opposed” is to set a very stringent standard
indeed, but not necessarily an indefensible one. But when w e read a few
pages later that the feudistes, w ho advised the lords on their valid claim s,
w ere “ bitterly attacked in the cahiers”7* w e are astonished. Table 2 .4
show ed that discussion o f all seigneurial agents, including the feudistes, is
not even am ong the dozen m ost frequently discussed aspects o f the
seigneurial regim e. W e are not so m uch protesting that Cobban has exagger
ated the degree to which the seigneurial agents w ere a focu s o f attack, but
that, in the absence o f the discipline im posed by a quantitative m ethodology,
the polem ical needs o f the m om ent can dictate his standard o f what it m eans
to say som ething is vigorously attacked in the cahiers. T o argue that the
system w as hardly attacked at all, he invokes the franc-fief as a standard o f
com parison. To show that it was in its increasingly bourgeois characteristics
rather than in its feudal residue that the system was condem ned, he invokes
the feudistes, far less w idely discussed, in fact, than many seigneurial
rights.77
Cobban’s evidence is elusive even when he is not deploying quasi-
quantitative claim s. In discussing the bailliage o f M irecourt, he tells us that
the tow n cahier fails to m ention seigneurial rights, by contrast to the rural
docum ents. This clearly supports his thesis that the attack on the seigneurial
regim e is the w ork o f the countryside, and not o f the urban notables at all.
But a few sentences earlier he supported his claim by telling us that “ the
75. Cobiban, SocialInterpretation, 38.

76. Ibid.. 49.
77. There are a number of other misleading daims by Cobban. He asserts that “the best
preserved, and most universally hated, of the seigneurial rights, were the banalités of miD, wine or
olive press, and oven” and that "the right of the banal miD” was “the most widely denounced abuse
in the cahiers” (ibid., 50). Table 2.5 shows that for the Third Estate, even the monopoly on miffing
is less widely discussed than the exclusive right to hunt, the right to raise pigeons, seigneurial tolls,
compulsory labor services. The other monopolies are even less discussed- Nor is the monopoly on
miffing the most frequent target of parish grievances (although those who discussed it did loathe it).
Nor is Table 3.4 consistent with the claim of Third Estate reluctance to abolish these monopolies
(ibid., 51). Nor for that matter, can the banalité dufour be grouped among the "best preserved” of
rights. It was often in grave difficulty; see Jean Bastier, Laféodalité au siècle des lumières dans la
région de Tbulouse (1730-1790) (Paris: Bibliothèque Nationale, 1975), 169-71, for evidence. The
point here is not to enumerate Cobban’s leaser errors as anissue in itself but to show how unreliable
his sort of impressionistic quasi-quantitative argument can be.
peasants o f N euborg in Normandy com plain o f the taille but not o f the
seigneurial regim e."78 It is as if he feels his thesis is supported when
peasants oppose seigneurial rights and when they don’t To say the le a st it
is not obvious what is the relevance o f the view s o f N euborg’s inhabitants.
Even harder to grasp, and far m ore fundamental to his argum ent is the
evidence for his contention that w ell-to-do com m oners, having so frequently
acquired seigneuries, are indistinguishable from noble seigneurs in regard
to their interests in seigneurial rights.798 0B u t as m entioned above, he totally
fails to com plem ent his reading o f Third E state cahiers with a study o f the
nobles’ docum ents. (O ur ow n study show s quite dram atic d ifferen ces.)
M ethodologically, Cobban failed to establish any benchm arks from w hich
to gauge Third E state opinion. On these grounds alone his case would
be su sp ect
O ne final p oin t Cobban is certainly correct when he points to the
existen ce o f non-noble lords. But he m isses the point o f view o f the actors
for whom “n obles" and “ lord s" w ere closely related social categories. T he
sense o f the seigneurial rights as a sort o f abstract collective possession o f
the nobility is quite clear in many cahiers. The nobles o f Lim oges, fo r
exam ple, discuss “ seigneurial courts and other honorific rights” under the
heading: “ O f N oble P rivileges"; the nobles o f B erry under a sim ilar heading
go even farther and take up all seigneurial rights. The parish o f Dom julien in
M irecourt, under the heading o f “ seigneurial rights,” begins to discuss the
“ dom ination o f the seigneurs” but shifts to the “ dom ination o f the N obility."
T he nobles o f Soule go so far as to characterize the seigneurial rights as
“ essentially n ob le," and to speak o f “ tithes” as “ the oldest and m ost precious
p ossession " o f the local nobility; they even refer to seigneurial m onopolies
as “ our righ ts.” T he parish o f B ucey-en-O the in T royes conflates the tw o
term s in discussing seigneurial rights under the heading “ concerning the
N obility and the seigneurs. ’,8° In such an ideational m atrix, it is not obvious
that Third E state texts that urge com pensation are invariably m otivated by
the protection o f what they see as their ow n private in terests, rather than
by a m ore abstract resp ect for property (w hich o f cou rse p rotects other
interests o f theirs).
Speaking
If w e are to see the joint action against the lords as the product o f an
interaction o f peasants and legislators, w e need a som ew hat different
78. Cobban, SocialInterpretation, 37.

79. Ibid., 44-48.
80. AP 3:569-70; 2:322; 5:779; E. Martin, Cahiers de doléances du bailliage de Mirecourt
(Epinab Imprimerie Lorraine, 1928), 61-62; Jules-Joseph Vernier, Cahiers de doléances de bailliage
de Dvyes (principal et secondaires) et du bailliage de Bar-swr-Semepour les états généraux de 1789
Choyés: P. Nouei. 1909), 1:466-67.
Conclusion 601
m ethodological toolkit than w e would if w e could confidently root peasant

actions in a pristine peasant opinion alone, legislative action in the pristine
view s o f legislators, solely m odified, at m ost, to conform to the interests o f
their m ore influential constituents. We need to see the speech o f both sides
as in significant degree strategic; that is, as calculated to produce certain
effects and avoid others. We cannot see the cahiers as sim ply the outcom e
o f interests that are fixed by social structures nor can w e see insurrection as
the outcom e o f certain external structures alone. The making o f grievances
involves som e sen se o f the likely consequences o f {daring certain statem ents
in a cahier; the making o f collective actions involves som e sen se o f the
consequences o f attacking a socially defined target in a particular w ay.
Political speech is to be seen as instrum ental as m uch as it is expressive.
W hen the tw o parties differ as m uch in resou rces as did F rance's peasants
and officials (the king’s and the revolutionary legislatu res'), there are som e
specific features o f their exchanges that James S cott’s w ork helps us grasp.
On the peasant side, w e should exp ect a great deal o f caution that m ight
show up in many w ays: the avoidance o f open challenges to the norm s and
values publicly advocated by the dominant strata, the attem pt to define
situations o f challenge as involving m itigating circum stances that lessen risk
when failure occu rs, and an acute sensitivity to even slight m odulations o f
the tone o f elite discourse. The last thing w e should exp ect from rational
peasants is a coherent, integrated, and explicit ideological challenge to the
prem ises o f the social order. W hen w e fail to find it, w e ought not to b e
overquick to assum e that they are intellectually incapable o f grasping their
interests. I subm it that the w ays in which the country people distinguished
am ong their various burdens (see Chapters 2 and 3) is not only, in itself, a
sign o f reflection upon their situation but is also an appropriately cautious
w ay o f making claim s. Even so, it was an act o f som e courage in the spring
o f 1789 to defy the seigneurial judges w ho presided over so many o f the
assem blies in practice81 (although not nearly so universally as one m ight
exp ect from the letter o f the law)82 and in many com m unities th ose judges
appear to have been d efied.83 Calling for a m ix o f abolition, indem nification,
81. The inhabitants of Velara, in the bailliage ai Aix, for example, plainly and bitterty expressed
fears of retaliation by the seigneur in response to the condemnation of seigneurial institutions in
their outspoken cahier (AP 6:438).
82. See Shapiro and Markoff, RevolutionaryDemands, chap. 9.
83. In one parish in Quimper, the procureurfiscal of the local seigneurial court took pains to
indicate that his signature merely verified Ms legally required presence, and in no way indicated Ms
approval of the document over whose adoption he presided, but some of whose articles he
abhorred—especially those dealing with "property.’' The bailliage of Rennes seems to have seen
many such incidents, perhaps because it combined anactive seigneurial judiciary with great peasant
hostility to the seigneurial regime. In one parish, the procureurfiscal tried to hold an assembly at
the lord’s château, where he intended to promote a very pro-noble text The peasants refused to
attend, and held their own assembly—which he refused to chair—elsewhere. Also in Rennes we
find places where the peasants studc to their guns even though the chairman refused to sign the
and reform in the spring was m uch safer than calling fear the abolition o f
everything and surely far less likely to panic the state into repressive
m easures, yet it was risky enough to annoy many a presiding judge. A year
later, when the National A ssem bly had abolished much o f seigneuriaksm ,
w hile still keeping many kinds o f dues pending an (im probable) indem nity
paym ent, the clim ate o f elite acceptance, the absence o f any significant
seigneurial counterthrust, and the deterioration o f state repressive capacity,
suggested to many peasant com m unities that they not accept the legislative
package, how ever m uch it resem bled a distillation o f what they and 40,000
other village com m unities had asked for.
D efiance often took the form o f surreptitious evasion o f paym ent W hen
a m ore visible challenge w as m ounted, how ever (and, no doubt, our ow n
sam ple o f 1,687 antiseigneurial incidents w as but a fraction o f th ose that
occu rred ) a variety o f tim e-tested routines for the avoidance o f full responsi
bility in the event o f failure w as incorporated into peasant actions and in the
talk surrounding those actions. T here w ere the m isunderstandings o f the
laws; there w ere the claim s that the king had authorized som e action (o r, in
the new er version o f political correctn ess, there w ere the daim s that the
revolutionary legislature had done the authorizing). T here w as the claim
that the villagers believed that the legislature’s laws w ere false, as in the
Southw est w here villagers said that the basic law earm arking many rights
for indem nification was actually w ritten by the lords (se e AP 21:457).
W hatever the pow er o f such a claim to enroll peasants for open m obilization,
its flam boyantly preposterous character m ade it all the m ore com pelling as
an em blem o f peasants being led astray. Q uite w idespread throughout the
w hole period o f antiseigneurial struggles w as the claim to w ily w ish to see
the lord’s titles. This not only appeared far m ore m oderate than a dem and
for im m ediate root-and-branch abolition, but it sim ultaneously appeared to
identify peasants with the cause o f legality in the abstract (probably a good
tack to take with revolutionary law yer-legislators) as w ell as w ith support
for the specific legal fram ew ork erected by those legislators in which titles
assum ed so m uch im portance. That m ost lords couldn’t produce the papers
dem anded, that seigneurial resistance could easily lead to great property
destruction, that on ce produced the docum ent itself could be d estroyed
m eant in practice that the seigneurial regim e would disintegrate if actually
forced to try to cough up this p iece o f paper. This last point can be seen
when w e note that on ce the state reappropriated the peasant com plaint and
dem anded, in effect, that the lords com e up w ith the docum ents— by shifting
document See Jean Savina and Daniel Bernard, eds., Cahiers de doléances des sénéchaussées de
Quimper et de Concarneau pour les états généraux de 1789 (Rennes Imprimerie Oberthun 1927),
hüi; Henri Sée and André Lesort, eds., Cahiers de doléances de la sénéchaussée deReúnespour les
étatsgénéraux de 1789 (Rennes: Imprimerie Oberthur, 1909-12), l:bd-bdv.
Conclusion €03
the burden o f p roof to the lords in the legislation o f August 1792— the
seigneurial regim e w as at on ce near death (se e Chapter 8, p. 465) and, after
a final spurt, peasant com m unities for the m ost part halted antiseigneurial
m obilization (se e p. 497). B y such devices, the French peasants w ho pushed
the Convention to abolish seigneurialism in principle w ithout indem nities,
could, w hen arrested, be treated as m erely ignorant and m isled.
And in a turbulent clim ate w here the pow erful saw conspiracies every
w here, peasants could portray them selves as sim ple people m isled by a
sinister, educated leadership. V iscount de M irabeau passed on to the
National A ssem bly an “ eyew itness” account o f antiseigneurial violen ce. A
B reton gentlem an inform ed the legislators that local peasants not only
denied having anything to do w ith the violen ce, but that the initial small
nucleus o f the pillaging band was ‘Ted by intelligent m en, w hose faces w ere
not w orn dow n by rural labor. ” And he goes on, “ there w ere som e am ong
them speaking Latin.”84
T he m ethodological point is to be neither too quick to see in any set o f
docum ents the authentic voice o f these peasants nor too sim ple-m inded in
judging their w ishes. All w e ever actually see is the expression o f w ishes
under particular circum stances. W ishes evolve over tim e in a dialogic
p rocess as changing circum stances, which may have altered in part as a
result o f a prior expression o f w ishes, encourage reform ulations o f those
w ishes. Claim s o f m otivation are often p ost h oc reconstructions designed to
give a certain plausible narrative coh eren ce to a stream o f even ts by placing
them all in relation to som e presum ed goal.
From the point o f view o f how peasants and legislators took each other
in, the report o f tw o agents sent out to the département o f L ot is a gold
m ine.85 A ssigned the task o f getting to the roots o f the puzzling violen ce
that had resisted the best efforts o f local adm inistrators (A P 2 1 :4 5 6 -5 8 ),
the earnest investigators arrive in Cahors at the very end o f 1790 and
im m ediately d iscover that far from having exaggerated the local difficulties,
the tale told by departm ental officials considerably understates the difficult
reality (Jlapport, 1 0 -1 2 ). Around G ourdon the peasant forces have defeated
the line arm y and district officials have fled in terror; around Lauzerte ex
nobles have form ed an arm ed body to which peasants respond by incinerat
ing several châteaux every day; the garrison in Cahors sees itself “ in
84. AP 11:368. The plausibility of tías tale to thelegislators may be indicated by the response of
Grégoire, a radical deric perhaps sensitive to the implication that the nucleus of insurrection was
supplied by radical defies—who else would be speaking Latin? He does not dismiss the anonymous
eyewitness out of hand but observes that the Committee on Reports has seen no supporting
evidence (AP 11:536).
85. Jacques Godard and Léonard Robin, RapportdeMessieursJ. GodardetL. Robin, commissaires
civils, envoyéspar le roi, dans le départementde Lot, en execution du décret de fAssembUtNationale,
du 13 décembre 1790 (Paris: Imprimerie Royale, 1791). Subsequently died as Rapport
€04 THE ABOLITION OF FEUDALISM
open w ar against the inhabitants” and considerable fear is experienced in

M ontauban and Figeac. M atters are grave enough to dem and considerable
thought: “ B efore acting, it was necessary to study the even ts, the character
o f the inhabitants and the principles that m ust govern a new ly freed people
in ord er to find the proper m eans to put dow n excess and restore order”
( Rapport, 12). Nothing daunted, the tw o legislators prepare their advice fo r
the departm ental officials— and w e are astonished to note that it is w ily
January 1 ,1 7 9 1 , exactly (m e day after they have presented their credentials
to local officials. H ow quick w ere agents o f “ enlightened” legislators, to use
a favorite term o f self-praise, to feel their conceptual fram e gave them a
handle on particular even ts! A t that point, how ever, new s o f a series o f
pillages m akes them decide to delay their recom m endations until they’ve
actually talked to som e peasants. And so the tw o travel, unarm ed and
unescorted (th ey wouldn’t have it any other w ay), through a devastated
countryside, bringing the true w ord to the country people w ho have lost
their w ay.86 T h ey learn o f peasants w ho claim that the laws requiring
paym ent pending indem nities are fabrications (Rapport, 19); they find that
everyw here peasants em ploy at least som e o f the proper law yers’ language
(“ T h ese w ords— ‘prim ordial title'— cam e at the sam e tim e out o f every
m outh when w e spoke o f seigneurial dues” ) ;87 they hear peasants ju stify not
paying current dues on grounds that the lords ow e them vast restitutions
for im properly collected dues in the past and that, th erefore, even im plicitly
accepting the legality o f the lords’ claim s, the lords ow e them m ore than
they ow e the lords (Rapport, 25). A s for w hether or not m aypoles are a sign
o f sedition— a m atter o f som e debate am ong the legislature’s w ould-be
peasantologists (AP 2 1 :4 5 7 -5 8 )— peasants questioned on the m eaning o f
the m aypole reliably give the politically correct response that it’s a “ sign o f
rejoicing for liberty” (Rapport, 30). W hen asked w hether they held to the
fantastic idea “ as several people told us, that when a m aypole w as planted
for a year and a day, you w ere, at the end o f this tim e, freed from paym ent
o f seigneurial righ ts,” the villagers sm ile at such a silty idea (Rapport,
3 0 -3 1 ). W hile som e m aypoles are decorated with seditious em blem s (a
86. Just as peasants may have adjusted their speech to the expectations at the two investigators,
the duo may have similarly sought the right language for their own audience. In a letter explaining
their task to the local priests, they speak of “the ministry of peace” with which they have been
entrusted; "such a doctrine is that of the Evangelist whom you preach and our present mission
resembles yours in some ways”; they “pray” that the priests wŒexplain the important “misaion” to
their parishioners [Rapport, 15-16).
87. Rapport, 24. Far to the north, peasant petitioners also knew how to use the proper legal
language about seigneurial rights when they addressed the National Assembly; see Bryant T. Ragan
Jr., “Rural Political Activism and Fiscal Equality in the Revolutionary Somme,” in Bryant T. Ragan
Jr. and Elizabeth A. Wiliams, eds., RtcnatmgAuthority m Rtmtutumary Franc* (New Brunswick:
Rutgers University Press, 1992), 44.
Conclusion 605
w eathervane yanked from a château’s ro o t for exam ple), m ost are resp ect
ably adorned, if adorned at all: “m aypoles are not in them selves signs o f
sedition.” Yet G odard and Robin note, in one o f their many m om ents o f
recognizing that em pirical realities are violating their expectations, that the
num ber o f m aypoles m ultiplied rapidly “after the triumph that the peasants
obtained over the troops o f the line. ”“ O ther peasants p rofessed them selves
unwilling participants in even ts: if they planted m aypoles it w as because
they w ere afraid o f insurrectionary neighbors; if they failed to pay dues or
joined in the attack on G ourdon, it w as for the sam e reason (Rapport, 34).
W hile disorder rages on all sides, and even re-em erges in locales they have
lately quitted, the tw o legislators are delighted that their personal appear
ance recalls the peasants to reason: “ W hen w e've spoken to the people
about their ex cesses, they have acknow ledged their w rongdoing and have
shown the m ost sincere contrition” (Rapport, 49).
Through all o f this, the tw o com m issioners maintain their b elief that a
small num ber o f “ instigators" have m isled the great m ajority o f peasant
activists. An effective pacificatory policy, then, m ust contain a pedagogic
dim ension: "W e thought, in a w ord, that it in the cities, generally speaking,
people understand the laws m ore easily than in the countryside, and if they
are observed there with m ore exactitude (unless som e party spirit m isleads
the citizen s), it is because education is m ore w idespread there. It is
necessary th erefore to diffuse it equally in the countryside" (Rapport, 57).
The view o f the country people as sim ple but fundam entally respectfu l o f
the revolutionary institutions that perm eates this report and perm its its
authors to take their peasant interview ees at face value m uch o f the tim e
w as in no w ay shared by the anxious and frightened local officials w ho
maintained consistently that “ the principal cause o f the insurrection, perhaps
the only one, is found in the desire and the hope to which the country people
have im prudently given them selves up, the desire to be freed forever from
the seigneurial dues” (Rapport, 136). W hile acknow ledging the case for such
an alternative explanation o f the pervasive insurrectionary clim ate, the
investigators stick to their ow n view , a view that favors a patient attitude
by the authorities m ore than it d oes a punitive one, in ord er to allow tim e
for a proper d v ic education to make the use o f force against the rural
com m unities superfluous. In a tone o f pride, they recount som e o f their
lesson s to th ose o f good heart but uninstructed. T hey tell the country 8
88. Rapport, 32. Whenquestioned about amaypolecondemningaparticularseigneurial obligation,

the members of the nearby village profess astonishment: “They have never heard this inscription
mentioned. They responded that they did not know it existed and that they could not even imagine
that it even could exist since most of them had already paid the dues and the others were ready to
pay” (ibid., 56). For their part, the two commissioners are surprised that the municipal government
of Cahors “whose zeal and whose activity nothing escapes, was unaware of such a deed” (ibid).
people, so they teD us, that now that all are free and equal, the rights o f ex
lords need be resp ected (Rapport, 3 1 -3 3 ); they even praise peasant suspi
cion o f legislative intent, since the new revolutionary openness m eans that
“ everything m ust be scrutinized by all” (Rapport, 21); they prom ise that
those genuinely devoted to overturning the Revolution will be dealt with
severely but that the great m ajority need little m ore than better inform ation.
The language o f liberty and equality is used to extract rural assent to a
program that had left intact im portant peasant obligations, but that is
experienced as epochal by the investigative duo. A t no point in their journey
in the insurrectionary zone do they encounter peasants w ho announce their
defiance o f the National A ssem bly and precious few w ho, openly, g o an
inch beyond announcing their credentials as partisans o f the new order.
E veryw here, they report, the peaceful peasants, som etim es full o f rem orse,
show their desire to obey the law. Yet as they m ove on to new villages,
those behind them som etim es explode on ce again. And as they prepare
their report, back in Paris, the local authorities w rite that the region is not
at all pacified (Rapport, 1 3 6 -3 8 ).
W hat perm its such a dialogue is a com m on fram ew ork, differently inter
preted. T he law, the National A ssem bly, liberty and equality are significant
touchstones, but all intersect the notion o f property. That one’s property—
including on e's property in on eself— is beyond arbitrary governm ent action
is an essential elem ent o f the sen se o f a rule o f law as it appears in the
cahiers; liberty is the capacity to freely dispose o f property (alw ays including
one’s ow n energies and capacities); and equality can be the claim o f equal
rights in law, the very counterclaim to “privilege.” W e have seen repeatedly
how deeply an im age o f a society o f individuals, equal in rights, none o f
whom p ossess coerciv e resou rces o f their ow n and all o f whom count on the
state to en force the rights o f all perm eates the cahiers— including the
nobles’ texts which make very little attem pt at any defen se o f a corporate,
hierarchical, and immutable order. The language o f rights and the language
o f property are nearly fused in the cahiers o f the elites. A fundamentally
contractual view o f social relations is everyw here: the elites see property
as exchangeable in freely consented contracts and hence can im agine
legitim izing many seigneurial rights in the spring o f 1790 by claim ing a
voluntary and contractual aspect to lord-peasant relations. T h e villagers,
too, in their ow n docum ents, evaluate taxation, church exactions, and
seigneurial rights in term s o f services rendered in return for com pensation.
W hile far less prone than the elites to discuss the abstract principles o f
rights and how those rights m ight best be em bodied in a new constitution in
the making, they nonetheless express a quasi-contractual view o f their
relations with those w ho extract resou rces from them , and quasi-contracts
should be abrogated when the service goes unfilled (unless, in the view o f
som e, it seem s feasible to com pel the lords to fill the serv ice).
Conclusion 607
An Emerging Political Profession

A longside contractual im ages, the hand o f the legal profession s seem s
everyw here: in the orderly character o f peasant cahiers, a dram atic contrast
w ith 1614; in the arrangem ent o f articles in noble cahiers, a notable, if
perhaps lesser, contrast (see Chapter 2, p. 84); in the stress on crafting the
constitution to be w ritten rather than rediscovering the constitution that has
always been. Innum erable parish cahiers show long fam iliarity w ith rule-
bound royal bureaucracies and noble cahiers justify seigneurial rights with
notions o f contractual legality rather than divine will. O ne o f the m ost w idely
discussed topics in the cahiers w as the tax on legal docum ents—the droit de
contrôle (se e Table 2 .1 )— which, unlike m ost indirect taxes, was w idely held
w orthy o f reform (see Table 3 .7 ). T he people o f the countryside recogn ize
som e value to a bureaucratized registry o f transactions, displaying simulta
neously their acceptance o f a rationalized state80 and a society o f individuals
entering into freely consented contracts. We know that law sch ools w ere
producing far m ore graduates8 90 than could be readily assim ilated into tradi
9
tional legal roles; perhaps this is w here som e o f those law yers cam e from
w ho took on the cases o f peasant com m unities in what appear to be rising
num bers o f lawsuits91 against the lords in the cou rse o f w hich, to follow
H ilton R oot’s suggestion, villagers and law yers togeth er forged the language
o f the antiseigneurial discussions o f 1789.92 Even the Revolution’s insurrec
tions carried a legalistic strain in appropriating elem ents o f the state’s
adm inistrative and judicial practice as w ell as in subsiding when the state in
its turn appropriated the insurrectionary practice. W e’ve noted G odard and
Robin m arveling at how the villagers o f the rebellious Southw est spoke the
legalese o f “ prim ordial titles” and w e have noted M erlin’s disparagem ent
(see Chapter 8, p. 468) o f the Convention’s taking the burning o f such titles
back from the people (see also Chapter 5, p. 263). Legal professionals are
everyw here in the late Old Regim e: m ost dram atically, they are cen ter
stage in prom oting a notion o f a public as a sort o f tribunal before which the
89. John Markoff, "Governmental Bureaucratization: General Processes and an Anomolous

Case,” ComparativeStudies mSociety andHistory 17 (1975): 479-503.
90. Richard Kagan, “LawStudents and Careers in Eighteenth-Century Ftance,” RatandPresent
68(1975): 38-72.
91. Cobijones speaks of M a Golden Age of Feasant Litigiousness”; see his "Bourgeois Revolution
Revivified: 1789 and Social Change,” in Cohn Lucas, ed., Rewriting the French Revolution (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1991), 87. For a regional instance see Maurice Gresset, Gens de justice à
Besançon de la conqûete par Louis XIV à la Révolution française, 1674-1789 (Paris: Bibliothèque
Nationale, 1978), 2:731-34.
92. Hilton Root, Feasants and King m Burgundy: Agrarian Fóundatwns <4French Absolutism
(Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1987), 183-93.
m isdeeds o f the high and m ighty are to be judged.99 In the cou rse o f
inventing such a public opinion, the legal professionals are also inventing the
notion o f a dispassionate com m itm ent to public service; that is, what their
ow n activism is held to b e .9* And under a vision o f a society o f individuals,
w hose arrangem ents are freely negotiated contracts, en forced in im partial
cou rts w here rights are equal, legal professionals, the experts in the crafting
and interpretation o f valid contracts, constitute a sort o f social lubricant that
m akes society run. In such a view , the crafting o f a constitution (in w hich,
o f cou rse, law yers can play a m ajor role) becom es the primal political a c t In
our ow n tim e the notion o f a society as a body o f individuals w hose different
claim s w ere to be harm onized by a properly crafted constitution has been
giving w ay to a m ore managerial vision o f a collectivity needing to b e
properly directed: constitution-w riting is far less spoken o f today as essential
to dem ocratic consolidation, having been largely supplanted by the crafting
o f econom ic policy as the foundation o f political life.9 95 But in France tw o
4
9
3
centuries ago, the radical break was experienced as tied to the notions erf
liberty, property, and law.
T he com plex electoral p rocess o f 1789 dram atically thrust law yers to the
fore. M erchants, governm ent officers, m edical m en and, m ost dram atically,
m em bers o f the legal profession s, w ere to be found in the bailliage assem
blies m uch m ore often than in either the prim ary assem blies or the general
population. Indeed, virtually every opportunity to select deputies in the
m ultiple phases o f the electoral p rocess for the Third E state augm ented the
proportion o f law yers and legally trained officials. Peasants ch ose a significant
93. Keith Michael Baker, “Politics and Public Opinion under the Old Regime: Some Reflections,"
inJack R. Censer andJeremy D. Foplmi, eds., Press andftditics mPre-Revolution France (Berkeley
and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1987), 204-46; Sara Maza, “Le tribunal de la
nation: Les mémoires judiciaires et l’opinion publique à la fin de l’Ancien Régime,” Annales:
Economies, Sociétés, Civilisations 42 (1987): 73-90. For more on lawyers as vanguard social critics
see Sarah Maza, "Domestic Melodrama as Political Ideology: The Case of the Comte de Sanois,”
American Historical Review 94 (1989): 1249-64, and "The Rose-Girl of Salency: Representations of
Virtue in Prerevolutionary France,” Eighteenth Century Studies 22 (1989): 395-412; Hans-Jürgen
LQsebrink, “L’affaire Cléreaux (Rouen, 1786-90): Affrontements idéologiques et tensions institutio
nelles autour de la scène judiciaire au XVIIIe siècle,” Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century
191 (1980): 892-900; David A. BeD, "Lawyers into Demogogues: Chancellor Maupeou and the
Transformation of Legal Practice in France, 1771-1789,” Past andPresent, no. 130(1991): 107-41,
and Lawyers and Citizens: The Making ofa Political Elite in OldRegime France (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1994); Lenard R. Berianstein, “Lawyers in Pre-Revohitionary France,” in Wilfred
Prest, ed, Lawyers in Early Modem Europe andAmerica (London: Croom Helm, 1981), 164-80.
94. Luden Karpik, “Lawyers and Politics in France: 1814-1950: The State, the Market and the
Public,” Law and Social Inquiry 13 (1988): 707-36; "Le désintéressément,” Annales: Economies.
Sociétés, Civilisations 44 (1989): 733-51. See abo Maurice Giesset, Gens dejustice à Besançon,
2:626-33.
95. See John Markoff and Verónica Monteemos, “The Ubiquitous Rise of Economista."Journal
ofPublicMicy 13 (1993): 37-68.
Conclusion 609
num ber o f m en o f law, such as notaries, law yers, even seigneurial ju dges,
as w ell as peasant notables to send to bailliage assem blies. W hen represen
tatives o f the various guilds m et to draft a tow n cahier, the drafting
com m ittee had proportionally m ore law yers than the tow n assem bly as a
w hole, and this is true also o f the tow n’s delegation to the baüliage assem bly.
T he com m issioners drafting baüliage cahiers favored law yers and royal
officers; if, in accordance with the convocation regulations, a reduction in the
num ber o f deputies from tow er assem blies was carried out, the proportion o f
law yers rose still further. And, finally, three-fifths o f Third E state delegates
at Versailles w ere legal profession als.969 7Legal professionals continued to be
w eighty in the Legislative Assem bly87 and Convention98 as w e ll
A s peasant revolt and legislative action challenged and then overw helm ed
the w orld that had grow n up around the lords, legal professionals and their
professional close kin w ere both cast loose from their familiar routines and
seized opportunities to create new ones. Som e rem ade them selves and
others found them selves close to insurrectionary collective action. O ne
reads, for exam ple, o f the m eeting o f the municipal council o f D ôle in M arch
1789, interrupted by “ several hundred scoundrels, tw enty with hatchets and
erne or tw o w ith pistols” and led by “ a ttorn ey s/’99 M any found them selves
entering (and inventing) m odem political roles. François-N oël B abeuf had
pursued a career as a local feudiste, successfully advising local lords despite
his ow n plebeian origins. T he Revolution opened many things but shut dow n
96. François Furet, “Lea états généraux de 1789; Deux battages éSaent leurs députés," in
Fernand Braudel, ed., Conjoncture économique, structures sociales: Hommage à Ernest Labrousse
(Paris: Mouton, 1974), 433-48; Ran Halévi, "La monarchie et les élections: Position des pro
blèmes," m Keith Michael Baker, ed., The French Revolution and the Creation of Modem Political
Culture, voL 1, The Pflitical Culture of the OldRegime, 387-402; Abel Poitrineau, “Les assemblées
primaires du bailliage de Salers en 1789," Revue ¿Histoire Moderne et Contemporaine 25 (1978):
419-41; Roger Chartier, “Cultures, lumières, doléances”; Michel Naudm, "Les élections aux états-
généraux pour la ville de Nîmes,” Annales Historiques de la Révolution Française 56 (1984):
495-513; Edna Hindie Lemay, “Les révélations d’un dictionnaire: du nouveau sur la composition de
l’Assemblée Nationale Constituante (1789-1791)" Annales Historiques de la Révolution Française,
no. 384 (1991): 159-89; Cresset, Gens dejustice à Besançon, 2:759-63.
97. From Kusdnski’s sketchy indications of their backgrounds, I calculated that a irinenum of
39% of the members of the Legislative Assembly were lawyers of some sort Since Kusdnski often
indicates only the current public office (for example, “administrator of the district directory") rather
than all positions held, past and present, and does not identify those with legal backgrounds who
never practiced, one may be certain that the number is larger. See August Kusdnski, Les députés i
rAssemblée Législative de 1791 (Paris: Société de l'Histoire de la Révolution Française, 1900).
98. AUson Patrick, The Men of the First French Republic (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1972), 263-65. From Patrick’s figures (259), I calculated that at least 48% of the numbers
of the Convention were lawyers. Since she relied on Kusdnski for data on professions, this must be
regarded as a minimum figure for the reason stated in the previous footnote. See August Kusdnski,
Dictionnaire des Conventionnels (Brueü-en-Vfexin: Editions du Vexin Français, 1973).
99. Jean Egret, “La Révolution aristocratique en Franche-Comté et son échec,” Revue ¿Histoire
Moderne et Contemporaine 1 (1954): 266.
that career; in a transform ation that has defied the explanatory pow ers o f
his biographers,100 Babeuf becam e a cham pion o f peasant causes, first
achieving considerable prom inence in anti-tax m ovem ents but ultim ately
becom ing identified with the idea o f a radical redistribution o f land, the
"agrarian law” for which B arère had successfully asked the Convention to
vote the death d ecree (se e Chapter 8, p. 485). Babeuf claim ed to speak fix 1
th ose w ho repudiated the lim its o f revolutionary legislation on peasant affairs
and (Hi their behalf joined in organizing a clandestine m ovem ent for “ another,
far greater, far m ore solem n revolution, which will be the la s t” 1011
2Philippe-
0
Antoine M erlin,108 on the contrary, stood, if any single person did, precisely
for the w isdom o f that very legislation, as the m ajor architect and ch ief
defender o f the detailed d ecrees by which the National A ssem bly im ple
m ented the breakthrough o f August 4 -1 1 . For a Babeuf, even the com plete
abolition o f seigneurialism w as w oefully inadequate to the assurance o f a ju st
society ; for a M erlin, it w as way to o m uch, since a proper resp ect fo r
legitim ate property dem anded that a significant elem ent o f indem nification
be part o f any antiseigneurial program . M erlin’s repute as a legal thinker
w as great before the Revolution (as a collaborator on a m ajor treatise w hose
secon d edition o f 1784 m ade it one o f the very late pre-revolutionary w orks
cm feudal law to appear), considerable during the upheaval, and extended
w ay beyond (w hen he drafted yet another vast treatise, Questions of Law,
w hose first edition appeared under the Consulate).
In the m onths after the fall o f R obespierre in Therm idor, Babeuf, like
m uch o f the left, was very m uch a marginal figu re;103 renew ed publication o f
his radical journal, The People's Tribune, led to an arrest order from the
m inister o f ju stice— none other than M erlin, w hose ow n political star w as
risin g.104 B abeuf w ent to his death and M erlin capped his political ca reer as
a director. Returning to his love o f m ultivolum e legal referen ce w orks, he
brought out his secon d such manual, organized around likely questions
posed by the practicing attorn ey.105 In spite o f a seventeen-year exile as a
100. R. B. Rose, Gracchus Babeuf: The First Revolutionary Communist (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 1978); Victor M. DaKne, Gracchus Babeuf à la veille et pendant la grande
Révolutionfrançaise) (1785-1794) (Moscow. Editions du Progrès, 1976).
101. The words are Sylvain Maréchal's. See François Furet, “Babeuf” in François Furet and
Mona Ozouf, eds., A Critical Dictionary of the French Revolution (Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 1989), 184.
102. See Louis Gruffy, La vie et Foeuvre juridique de Merlin de Douai (Paris: Librairie de
Jurisprudence Ancienne et Moderne, 1934).
103. Isser Woloch, Jacobin Legacy: The Democratic Movement Under the Directory (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1970), 11-79.
104. Rose, Gracchus Babeuf, 220-21.
105. The very ñrst question of feudalism Merlin proposes to answer for the curious postrevotu-
thnary lawyer who, seeking his advice, consults the fourth edition of Questions ofLaw, is whether
a feudal contract entered into after August 11, 1789, but prior to the November promulgation of
Conclusion 611
regicide in the wake o f N apoleon's d efeat,106 he kept up his scholarly

pursuits, and continued to put out revised versions o f his m ajor manuals,
rem inding the nineteenth century what the feudal regim e on ce had b een .107
that edict by die king, was a valid contract Merlin, consistent with his position in the fall of 1789,
replies with a strong negative, far the king had no power to approve or disapprove this act of the
National Assembly. If the juxtaposition with Babeuf leads to simply seeing Ute extremely conserva
tive side of Merlin, it is worth remembering that the logic of his own unyielding position on
“feudalism” was radical enough for him to have very early embraced the legal theory of royal
disempowerment and ultimately to have consistently cast his votes on several questions that decided
the fate of Louis XVI with the regicides. See Philippe-Antoine Merlin, Recueil alphabétique de
questions de droit (Brussels: Tarber, 1829), art “féodalité.”
106. See Edna Hindie Lemay, Dictionnaire des constituants, 1789-1791 (Paris: Universitas,
1991), 659-62.
107. The prerevolutionary Répertoire dejurisprudence had a third edition that began to appear in
1807, a fourth in 1812, a fifth, prepared in Belgian exile, in 1827. The second edition of Questions
de Droit appeared in 1810, a third in 1819, a fourth began to appear in 1827. On the publishing
history see Gruffy, Merlin, 249-77.
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Index
Abbeville (baiUiage), 350-51 aides, 37,100,106a, 160,161, 238

abbeys. See monasteries not reformable, 101-2
Aberdam, Serge, 311,486-87 revolutionary legislation on, 349n
abolition and seigneurial regime in cahiers, 159-60
of ecclesiastical payments, 141. See also exac as target oí insurrection, 234
tions of church See also anti-tax events; General Farma/Gen-
of feudal regime, 13, 97,455,476; changing eral Farmers; taxation, indirect
meanings of, 458, 460,496-97, 582; de Aiguillon, Armand-Désiré Vignerot-Duplessis-
mands for, 72-89,141; France compared Richebeu, due d’ (legislator), 95a 440a
toother countries, 593-94. See ob« feudal: 445n, 457-58,466, 535-36
regime/rights; seigneurial regime and plans for night of August 4,430
Academy of Besançon, 77n proposed indemnification rate, 598n
action Aix (bailliage), 126-27,358a 601n
ina grievance, 23 Aix (city), 241n
in insurrection data, 209 Alençon (baiUiage), 51a 119n
Ado, Anatoly, 91,219, 224a 228-29,339 alienation of royal domain, 62n
on antifeudal actions, 214 alleux, 53,60, 526
data on rural insurrection, 207-8 alliance of peasants and bourgeois, 513-15
on indemnification, 90,93-94 Alps (region), 253,254a 395
on land conflicts, 294 origin of Federation movement, 421
on subsistence conflicts, 247a 291a 294 wage conflict, 294
on traditions of contestation, 219a 413 Alsace, 47,116a 451, 479a 490
on wage conflicts, 250 anti-Jewish events, 232
Agen (bailliage), 125,160n insurrections ia 158a 232,418,425
agendas in coWers ironworks ia 251
of nobles, 29-35,37.39, 47-50, 55-64, land conflicts ia 418
569-70 prerevolution ia 471
of parishes, 36-47, 55-64, 571-72 trajectory of revolt, 425
of Third Estate, 35-37, 39, 50-64, 570-71 Amiens (baiUiage), 128,350-51
agents of seigneur, 1 Amont, 9
in discussions of night of August 4,457-58 anarchy, 52a 201,435,438a 450,489-90,
low peasant interest in, 53-54, 571-72,574 521,536,571n
as target of insurrection, 222, 228 Angers
Agoult, Jean-Antoine, comte d’ (legislator), dty,84n
431a 448 region around, 350,424,493n
agrarian law, 255, 482a 485-86, 610 Anhah-Dessau-Köthen, 592
agriculture, demands about in cahiers, 176-78, Anjou, 346
182-83 Annonay (baiUiage), 125, 568
Agriculture Committees, 485 anti-authority events, 219, 240-41, 242,
Agulhon, Maurice, 387 274-75. See also insurrectionfs)
656 INDEX
antidericafism in alters, 199 target a social role, 502

antifeudal events, 219 titles as target, 220
antirevolution, 257,344n, 365n trees: of lord as target, 220; ofHwrtym, 224
antiseigneurial events, 3,13,218,319-20,344, variety of, 220-30
379,392, 407,409n violence in, 222, 225, 226c, 229, 499, 506-6
agents of lords as targets, 222,228 in wave of August-September 1792, 506n
arms as target, 503 in West, 346,361-65,415
army’s role in, 29In See also contexts of insurrection; geography
mBrittany, 415n, 580 of insurrection; ¡nsurrectkxKs); peaks of
changing: contexts of, 397-404; salience, conflict; trajectories of insurrection; waves
279,493,497; targets andtactics, 498-506 of insurrection
château as target, 220, 223n, 503-5 anti-tax events, 219,238,321,344,349,
churchbenches as target, 222, 503 378-79
and communal solidarity, 386-87 Babeufs role in, 610
and counterrevolution in West, 415 document destruction in, 234
document destruction, 220 and evasive noocompKance, 235, 237
dominant form of insurrection, 219, 577 few, 296,578
epicenters of, 228n wà gabelle, 348-51
family tomb as target, 222 and grievances about taxation, 236, 239
fence destruction, 220 in insurrectionary peaks, 275-76
gallows as target, 224 involve local authorities, 238
geographic concentration of, 289, 351-52, and literacy, 383
418 methodological issues, 219,234-37,296n
and Great Fear, 413, 414n in Normandy and North, 348,352
hospitality parodied, 220 peasants join with townsfok, 238
increase in late Old Regime, 265 personification of targets, 237
innovative character of, 333-34 possible rise in late 1790s, 237n
invasion of lord’s land, 220, 254 revolts of seventeenth century, 12,42, 235,
legislative focus on, 512 239,424
lord-church nexus as target, 156, 222-23, as seedbed of other forms of conflict, 219n,
229, 449, 499, 503 413-14
monastery as target, 222 on Sundays, 320
and National Guards, 420-21 trajectory, 292
notary’s involvement in, 220 undercounted, 219
organization o¿ 322 understudied by historians, 215-16, 236
in Paris region, 357 variety of, 233-34
in peaks of insurrection, 275, 295-96 See also contexts of insurrection; geography
peasants turn to, 42, 268, 411, 569, 578-82 of insurrection; insurrectioofs); peaks of
persons as targets of insurrection, 222,499, conflict; trajectories of insurrection; waves
502 of insurrection
recreational privileges as targets, 221-22 arable as context of revolt, 375, 393,407,413
renunciations of rights, coerced, 1, 220, arbitrariness of authority, grievances about, 33
503-4 Arbois (bailliage), 568
resemblances to subsistence events, 248 architecture, seigneurial, as status marker, 47.
rise and decline, 467, 494-98, 579 See also château; coats-of-arms; galows;
seizure of food, 227 symbolization of status; turrets as targets
in South, 361-67 of insurrection; weathervanes
inSoutheast, 357 archives. See documents as targets of insurrec
in Southwest, 346-47,360,580 tion; titles, seigneurial
surges in, 302 Ardant, Gabriel, 142'
symbolizations of status as targets, 503 Ardèche (département), 206n. 223n, 365n
Index 657
Armed Masks, 229n Bafly, Jean-Sylvain (legislator), 228n

arms, right to bear, 4,126 concerned with discontent, 434,44ln
disarming countryside, 48 on peasant reactions to new laws, 496
in early revolutionary legislation, 96 remembers night of August 4 ,428n
grievances about, 56, 73, 78, 87-88,91 Baker, Keith Michael, 608n
as honorific, 83n baker as target oí insurrection, 246
lord’s, as target, 223 ban
restrictions on, 119 defauchaison, 46
as status marker, 47, 86 de moisson, 46
See also hunting, seigneurial right of; symbol de vendange, 46,160
ization of status btmaUth
army, 291n dumoulin, 46
in breakdown of Old Regime, 382 dufour, 46
Seealso military concerns dupressoir, 46
arrears on seigneurial dues, 77,124-25,381. See also monopolies of seigneur, milling, sei
See also feudal reaction; payments to lord; gneurial monopoly ofi oven, seigneurial mo
seigneurialregime nopoly of; winepress, seigneurial monop
Artois, 228n, 348-51 oly of
Artois, comte d’, 126 banvm, 46,160
assignats andwage disputes, 292n barbarismand feudal regime, 87,458,521, 536,
attribution, 36 544,571n
Aubin, Gérard, 214 Barbotin, Emmanuel (legislator), 9
Aude (département), 409n complains about salary, 434
Aunis, 83n, 115 denounces idiocy in countryside and legisla
Auray (bailliage), 49,571n ture, 435,490
Austria, 477,592 Barère, Bertrand (legislator), 610
restores seigneurial regime in occupied on language, 545
France, 593n links Great Fear and night of August 4 ,429n
war with, 327 on preparations for night of August 4, 457n
See also Holy Roman Empire proposes comprehensive rural policy, 485-86
authorities on rural turbulence, 450
local, 228n. 238,441-42 Bar-le-Duc (bailliage), 439n
and insurrections, 238, 242, 262-64 Bamave, Antoine-Pierre-Joseph-Marie, 502n,
Autun 512,568
bailliage, 121n on break with past, 199
region around, 311n, 420 on feudaism and Revolution, 180-81,189,
Auvergne, 116, 431n, 445n 199
National Guards and political dubs in, 421n similarity of ideas to cakiers, 200
Auxerre (bailliage), 106n, 120 Baronnies (parish), 254n
Aval (bailliage), 434, 562n, 568 Bart, Jean, 489n
Avesnes (bailliage), 88n, 106n, 125, 521 Bastier, Jean, 83n, 115
aveu et dénombrement, 53n, 60,84 Bastille, 225
Avignon, 331n Bataillon, Jacques-Henri, 114
avowal and enumeration. See aveu et dénom Baugé (region around), 365n
brement Baume (bailliage). Tin
Babeuf, François-Noël (Gracchus), 2, 240n, Bavaria, 591
344, 485n, 609-10 Bazas (bailliage), 530-31
Baden, 591 Beaubec (abbey), 226n
Baecque, Antoine de, 489n Beauce, 313
Baüleul (bailliage), 87n BeauKeu-en-Argonne (parish) 39,107
bailliage, as electoral unit, 21-22 Beauvais (ibailliage), 168n
658 INDEX
Behrens, C. B. A., 104o famed criais in, 213-14

Belfort et Hiringue (baiUiage), 120 and insurrection, 288
Belgium, 474. 479o, 581, 592 Brest (baUiiage), 490
antifeudal occupation policy ñ, 478-79 Keton Club. 430, 456, 457a 534
Bd. David, 608n Brigands, 9. 244a 429a 431a 434, 489-90
Bdême (baiUiage), 125 Brissot, Jacques-Pierre (legislator), 473,478
Bdey (baiUiage), 34 Britaia 251,491. Set also England
benefit*». 163 Brittany. 2,13.95a 336.350,359a 451,458,
benefits oí Revolution incountryside, 589-90 461,603
Bercé, Yves-Marie, 306a 424 andatíá-gabdk actions, 348-51
Berlanstein, Lenard, 608n anrisdgneuriaiam ia 228a 356a 367a
Berry (baiUiage), 600 415a 580
Besançon, 77a 458a, 560 aaraaen/jnnn oi prawntg g , «mu
Beugnot, Jacques-Cbuda comte (legislator), counterrevolution ia 346,356a 367a 415a
548n 418
biases minsurrection data, 211-17,219 crowds stop grain afaipmenta 356
deviation oí, 216-17,236-37 earty to mobdize in countryside, 424
for anti-tax actions, 236, 296n early polarizatioa 357
due to: dramatic character of events, 212; efection to Estates-General ia 425,438n
historians’ selective interests, 215-16, and Great Fear, 378
236; sue of events, 212-15; urban proxim insurrections of winter 1790,511
ity, 211-12 lord-church nexus ia 156-56
bicentennial of 1989,442a 588-99 National Guards ia 420-21
Bien, David, 166 pro-revolutionary zones m, 346
Bigorre (baiUiage), 132 and reform of royal conies, lOOn
Bloch, Marc, 53, 384-85, 524, 568 renewed peasant uprisings ia 545, 562
Blois (baiUiage), 120-21,181-82 revolutionary tax reform ia 350a 590ti
Blum, Jerome, 3,169-70,199, 591 seigneurialjustice ia 83a 114,168n
bocage, 386-87 Third Estate radicalismia 430
Bohemia, 473 Tbrribtnsoi, 424
Bohstedt, John, 242n urban counterrevolution ia 346
Bois, Paul, 168a 238n, 346, 366 See also counterrevolution; West
Boissy d’Anglas, François-Antoine (legislator), Brive (region of), 227n
546-47 Brunot, Ferdinand, 545n
Boncerf, Pierre-François, 84,89, 597-96 Brusteia William, 19,352n
Bordeaux, 95n Bucey-en-Othe (parish), 113,600
Bosher, J. F., 376n Buisson (parish), 112-13
Boulainvtfbers, Henri, comte de, 61,85a burden of proof in peasant-lord Ktigatioa
523-24 461-62, 465-67, 482, 498, 503-5, 524,
537-38,584,602-3
BouDé, Jean-Pierre (legislator), 432n
burdens
Boulogne-sur-Mer (baiUiage), 122 differentiallyevaluated by peasants, 4,
Bourbon-Penthièvre, house of, 116,537n 132-36
Bourg-en-Bresse (baiUiage), 34.129 noble grievances about, 39
bourgeois-peasant alliance. See peasant- peasant grievances about, 12,20,36-47, 57,
bourgeoisalliance 128, 139,154-62, 571
Bouder, Jean, 227, 299. 336 Third Estate grievances about, 38
Bouton, Cynthia, 54a 242a 246-47, 314a weight of, 17
319a 376a 413a 499, 575 bureaucratization of state, 4,33,267
on violence, 248n Burgundy, 45a 334
Boutry, Philippe, 336 communal defense against seigneurial en
breakdown of authority, 135, 412-13, 508 croachments, 172-73
Index MO
customary tawon hunting, 126 Catholicism. See church

intensification of sdgneumliam in, 169,381n Cazatas, Jacques-Antoine-Marie de (legislator),
lord-church nexus in, 156 450n
priestly antiseigneurialism, 222n cens, 43, 53n. 62,191
seigneurial justice in, 11& 116n en commande, 53n
seigneurial monopoly on ovens, 79n indemnifying, 91-92
serfdom in. 52. 76-77 grievances about, 73,78,80
et rentes, 38,161; grievances about, 57, 78
Caen (baUUage), 351,445 See also payments to lord
catan Censer, Jack, 589n
of 1614, 84,134-35, 266, 269,335, 568-69, censitaire, 44
574,586,607 censúes, 53, 526
of 1789,22; anticipate revolutionaryconftcts, censorship, 29,36n
109-10, llln ; coding methods, 23-25; as centralization of state, 267
consciousness-raising, 143, 260; convoca Centón, baron de. See Píntevfle de Centón
tion of Estates-General, 20-22; definition Chalon-sur-Satae (bailliage), 119n
of “general,” 22n; jointly written, 129; Châlons-sur-Marne (baUUage), 122,447
Lafebvre on, 17; of nobdity, 13; number Champagne, 95n, 451
produced, 28n; resemblance to early legis champart, 45, 53n, 222
lation, 96-98; sample of, 22-23, 28-29, agriculture damaged by, 181-82,187
146n, 216n, 54In; as sources, 5-7,22, attacked in Legislative Assembly, 476
25-28; as strategic speech, 26-27, 601; of grievances about, 57, 73,80,82
Third Estate, 13; utifaarinnot 11; from indemnifying, 91-92
West, 366 opposed by physiocrats, 175-76
Cahors tithe confounded with, 158,161,219, 230
baUUage, 480n, 547n See also payments to lord
region around, 442, 543,603-5 Champion, Edmé, 28n
Calais (baUUage), 125 change, advocacy of, in cahiers, 66
calendar, revolutionary, 335n Charente-Inférieure (département), 95n
Cambon, Pierre-Joseph (legislator), 478 charivari, 309-10
Cambrés», 226n Charlemagne, 521
Cameron, IainA. 226n Charo0e8 (bailliage), 548n
Capetians, 524 Chartier, Roger, 134,266,574
capitaineries, 123. See also hunting, seigneurial
Chartres
right of
baUUage, 122
capitalism in countryside, 10, 529-31, 559
bisitop of. See Lubersac
intertwined with feudal language, 529
region around, 313,360n
capitation, 37,100,103,106
Chassin, Charles-Louis, 76n
Carcassonne (baUtiagt), 80-81
career access, privileged, 35-36,39, 83n, 571 château as target of insurrection, 220,223, 226,
and night of August 4,163 246, 290,355n, 499, 504-5,507,603. See
noble views of, 67 also symbolization of status
and seigneurial rights in cottars, 165-67, Château-du-Loir (baUUage), 367n
200-201 Châteauneuf (village near Rennes), 121
as honorific, 83n Châteauneuf-en-Thymerais (baUUage), 128
Caron, Pierre, 466n, 538n Château-Salins (baUUage), 123
Castan, Nicole, 116 Château-Thierry (baUUage), 109,120,122n,
CasteUemis (parish), 84n 309n
Casteknoron d’AIbret (bailliage), 157 Châteauvüain (region around), 537n
Castehnoron, marquis de, 530 Châtelet, duc du. Ser Du Châtelet Lomont
casuels, 38 dUaraucourt
moflttm, 109-10,154 Châtelerault (baUUage), 125
660 INDEX
ChätiBon-sur-Seine (bailliage), 122 See also casuels, cburtfa; religious events;

Chaumont-en-Bassigny (bailliage), 120 tithe
Chaussinand-Nogaret, Guy, 33n Oenncnt-en-Deauvaiaia (bailliage), 76n, 119n,
ChemiSé 125
région oC 257n, 2S8n Clermont-Ferrand (bailliage), 541n
town, 248 Clermont-Tonnerre, Stanislas-Marie-Adelaide,
Choiet (region of), 257n comte de (legislator), 544n
chouannerie, 143n, 256,415a Ser also counter Cbots, Anadiarais, 473n
revolution dubs, political. 311-312, 389,421-22,492
Christin, Charles-Gabriel-Frédéric (legislator), as organisational vehicles for insurrection,
562n 580
church, 5, 38,42,134-35,157,163, 232n, 555 coats-of-arms
buddings as target of insurrection, 232n abolition of, 453, 463-64,502n. 503
and counterrevolution, 258, 542 as status markers, 47
exactions: and demands for equity, 104,109; as target of insurrection, 57-58,223, 507,
as object of reform, 98,104,109,132-33; 525
and seigneurial regañe, 154-57 See also symbofisation of status
and festivals, 308-9 Cobb, Richard, 212
sale of land of, 456, 481 Cobban, Alfred, 10.91,9ta
Set also benefices; casuels; dergy; church- as critic of Marxists, 583, 589
benches of lord; God as source of authority; on deputies as lords, 456
lord-church nexus; monasteries; National doubts Third Estate antifeudafism, 129n,
Property, religion and seigneurial regime; 130n, 456, 513n, 567, 594-600
religious events; tithe on feudalism, 196-99
churchbenchesof lord onfnmc-fief, 158
grievances about, 57,78 on indemnification, 88-90
as seigneurial right, 47 on peasant role in Revolution, 19, 69n, 290
defended as contractual, 537 on rural/urbandivide, 238n
as target of insurrection, 59,156, 222, 259, on seigneurial agents, 54
421,507 codification of law, 29
See also lord-church nexus; symbofisation of coding methods, 23-25. Seealsomethodology,
status issuesof
dries and rand insurrection, 380-81,413 Coignet, Captain, 606
citizenship, 20,106-9, 574 Colbert, Jean-Baptiste, 51
and taxation, 135,142 commerce, grievances about, 176n, 178-81
dty/town riots, rural participation in, 238-39, commercialization and rural conffict, 251-52
246 commise, 53n
Civil Code, 486-87,555 Committee on the Constitution (Nrtional As
Civil Constitution of the Clergy, 230-31, sembly), 448
241-42, 249, 331, 413 on force in countryside, 511
dvd liberties, 29, 33, 36, 568 Committee on Feudal Rights
Legislative Assembly, 465,475-76
class conflict, 314, 389, 482-84, 486 National Assembly, 2,96-97,440n, 446a
andconscription, 293n 458-59, 480n, 523, 535, 557, 595, 597;
overland, 250-51 contradictory proposals of, 53; defines feu
and subsistence events, 319 dal regime, 525-2; dilatory pace of, 48;
and tithe legislation, 480 studies complaints of German princes, 471
and wage events, 250,319 Committee on Legislation (Convention), 467
dergy Committee of Public Safety (Convention), 450,
in National Assembly, 146, 444-45, 509 485n, 490
on night of August 4, 428 Committee on Reports (National Assembly),
and popular religion, 308-9 603n
Index 661
36,170
C O M M Ü h lM IS , literacy, 382, 398
common land and rural con&ct, Hin, 174-75, local andnational, 411
481 market, 380-82,399,407-8,568, 579-80
division of, 5, 481, 485-86 Mediterranean coast, 398
communal rights, 53,171-75,253-54. See also methodological issues, 338, 368-73
specific rights olive production, 387
communities openfieki, 375,385-87
juridically defined, 385 pasture, 391
organization of, 384-90 pays dilections, 379,399
complexionfeudale, 526, 540 prices, 371-74
Coocameau (region around), 350 roads, 375,380-81,399
Condé, Princesse de, 472 settlement patterns, 388
Condorcet, Jean-Antoine-Nicolas de Caritat, state, 376, 379, 399, 407-8, 411, 568, 579
marquis de (legislator), 432,436a 477, urbanpresence, 380-81,399
495-96 wasteland, 397-98
conflict, interactive nature of, 271 wine productioa 392-93
confraternities, 310,421 woodland, 393
conjuncture, 371-74,411 cootract(s), 60,85,480,555-56,559,571,582,
conscription, 5, 257a 258-59, 331,355n 606-8,610n
andantiseigneuriabsm, 475 hicahiers, 586
and dass divisions, 293n and Canstitutioa 557,606
and counterrevolution, 258 andfief, 525
evasion and resistance to, 39a 48a 212, in lawyers’ thought, 532, 536,538, 556-57,
423-24 586
grievances about, 39 in legitimating seigneurial dams, 96-97,189,
and wage laborers, 293 202, 223, 460, 478, 532, 534, 536-37
See also nditia peasant familiarity with, 107,124
conservation andlandconflict, 251-52 vs. treaties of princes, 471
conservatism among nobles Convention
in cahiers, 67, 79, 572 abandons earlier legislatioa 557
in National Assembly, 440, 444a 455 Agrarian Lawand, 485
Constituent Assembly. See National Assembly discusses rural turbulence, 450
Constitution, 40,142, 428, 433, 446a 456a lawyers in, 609
470,607 orders seigneurial documents burned, 505
as a contract, 557 and Parisian insurrection, 482
role of king under, 551 and peasant insurrection outside France, 478
Consulate, 610 pressed by peasants, 603
contestation radicalized, 482, 538-39
unity and diversity ia 411-17 reappropriatkmof legality, 607
prerevolutionary traditions of, 264-66 See also legislatioa* legislators; specific lasts
contexts of insurrection, 368-408,413 convergence of village and legislature, 585.54«
also dialogue
administrative centralization, 376 convoys of grain, blockage of, 244. See also
almond production, 387 subsistence events
arable, 375,393 correspondence of deputies as news source,
bocage, 386-87 492. See also news
cereal yields, 375-76,394,397-98 Corrèze {département), 95a 212
change ia 404-5 corvée
community organizatioa 384-90 royal, 37,161; grievances about, 100; and
labor migration, 394-95 public services, 104,106; and reform at
land-use, 390-94 tempts, 100a 106-7; and seigneurial re
legislation, revolutionary, 489 gime incahiers, 159-60
662 INDEX
seigneurial, 159-60, 571n, 599n; abolitionof, Customary Lawrestricts lord’s rights, 46, 227n
555; as barbaric, 105,160; demands far customs duties, 36,107
indemnification, 91; in early revolutionary cycles of protest, 322-24
legislation, 97-98; grievances about 36,50,
58, 73, 82, 91, 522; honorific aspect d, Dalby, Jonathan, 421n
192; king’s and lord’s, 160; as lucrative Dampierre, Ame-Ebéar, comte de, 249
right, 191; opposed by physiocrats, 175- Damton, Robert, 224n
76; Third Estate demands, 50-51 data file on insurrections
Counter-Reformation, 308n biases, 211-17
counterrevolution, 206n, 219-23, 257,258n, information recorded, 210-11
298-9, 336, 344, 360-61, 399, 407,450, See also methodology, issues of
467, 488, 490, 511, 538-39, 542, 606 Dauphiné, 1, 253, 377n, 382n, 431n, 438
and antiseigneurialism inWest, 415 Davis, Natalie Zemoo, 22n, 233
commonalities with other insurrectionary Dawson, Philip, 482n
forms, 413,415 death penalty, 441,610
conflicts over conscription and, 258 debt of government See finances of state
geographic concentration of, 206n, 344-46, Declaration of the Rights of Manand Citizen,
348, 352, 365, 418,421 204, 427-28, 456, 473n, 536
in Massif Central, 365n deer, as royal animals, 123
organization of, 143n, 322 defense of seigneurial rights, 202. See also
and peasant defense of priests, 109-10 honor; property
precocious mobilization in Provence, 421 deference, 47, 57, 78. See also churchbenches
prehistory of, 365 of lord; honor; honorific rights; precedence
in South, 206n as seigneurial right; symbolization of status
«Southeast, 348 deficit of state. See finances of state
on Sundays, 320-21 defilement as aspect of conflict, 233. See also
trajectory of insurrection, 278, 292-93 honor; humiliation
variety of, 256-59 democracy, far Ibcquevfle, 80,85,199-200
in wave of August-September 1792, 506n Denmark, 591-93
in wave of Mardi 1793, 294, 296, 302 deputation, 438
in West, 344-46, 365, 352 dérogeance and seigneurial regime in caters,
See also contexts of insurrection; geography 179-80
of insurrection; insurrection(s); peaks of descent through blood as source of status dis
conflict; trajectories of insurrection; waves tinctions, 464n
of insurrection desertion, mitary, 48n. See abo conscription;
courts, 36,112 mStaryconcerns
Third Estate confidence in, 112 destruction
See alsojustice; lawyers; litigation of documents, 220, 234, 261, 467
Couthon, Georges-Auguste (legislator), 449, of food, 226-27, 246n, 434
464-66, 470, 479n of seigneurial titles, 220, 455n, 469; bylaw,
on abolition of feudalism, 474-76 553
on honorific rights, 554 See also antiseigneurial events; Lawoh July
proposes new policy direction, 474 17,1793
Crépy-en-Valois (bailliage), 123 development, economic, 102,175-80,195-97,
Crook, Malcolm, 31In 522
croquants, 265, 424 importance for Third Estate, 128
Crubaugh, Anthony, 50n, 115n Dewald, Jonathan, 114
CubeOs, Monique, 357n, 358,409n, 419n dialogue
Custine, Adam-Phikppe, comte de (legislator), of center andperiphery in insurrection,
478n 423-26
custom as source of authority, 223 conflict’s interactive character, 271
Index 663
incountryside, 411 proche, 44a

of crowds and authorities, 262-64 able, 44
of elites and plebeians, 117,367n, 425-26, Domfront (bailliage), 351
520,582-94 Dotqjuüen (parish), 600
glimpsed in caters, 130-32 Dootenwiû, Serge, 156n
of legislature and countryside, 8-9,14-1% Dourdan (bailliage), 12% 434
204, 264, 396, 425-26, 482, 488-89,491, Doyle, William, 72
506-15, 51% 563, 577, 581-88, 593, on peasant role in Revolution, 20, 289
600-601 on proces8ual aspect of Revolution, 569n
peasants, eûtes, and Estates-Geneml, Draguignan
357-58 bailliage, 50% 521
of peasants andnotables, 572 region of, 226n
of peripheral eûtes and central administra drob
tors, 426 imsmaabon, 100,107,109n, 159
of urban and rural <«*>«, 512 de centième demer, 100,109n, 159,161
Dieuze (bailliage), 121 de contrôle, 37,109n, 135; demanda to re
Digne (bailliage), 87n, 119n form, 108,607; grievances about 100-101,
dignity as motive for action, 227, 521 107,607; as most discussed tax incahiers,
Dqon (bailliage), 122 102; and seigneurial regime, 159
«fine mßodie, 34,158,161,188,488-89 droits
Dion, Roger, 384-385,386n teñirte et desorbe, 100
Diplomatic Committee demarque, 100
National Assembly, 471-72 domaniaux, 100
Legislative Assembly, 474 Drôme (département), 253
discontinuity. See rupture Du Châtelet Lomont dUaraucourt, Florent-
dispersion of farmsteads, 388 Louis-Marie, duc (legislator), 429n, 445n
distinctions, hereditary, 462-64 dues
distinguishing among seigneurial rights, 62 on National Property, 464
contractual vs. usurped, 97,460,462, 534, periodic. See payments to lord
536-38,582 Dumouûn, Charles, 526, 540
feudal vs. legitimate property, 525-2% Dupont de Nemours, Pierre-Samuel (legisla
533-39, 542, 544, 55% 581-82 tor), 188
indemnified vs. abolished, 96-98» 430,45% Duport, Adrien-Jean-Françou (legislator), 552
45% 464-65, 535, 557-58 Dupuy. Roger, 310-11, 367,420n, 425
real vs. personal, 464, 536, 538 on Chouans, 415n
division of commons, 5,253-54,481,485-86 on counterrevolution andantiseigneuriafion,
documents as target of insurrection, 499, 502, 346
507 on National Guards, 311,33% 419n
in anti-tax events, 234 on West’s precocious politicization, 355,357,
destruction of, 220, 234, 261,467 366
Duquesnoy, Adrien-Cyprien (legislator), 439n,
discussed in Convention, 467
445n
in religious events, 229-30 considers repressive measures, 447
seizure of, 258-59, 261, 504 on insurrections and feudal rights, 449
See also titles as targets of insurrection on legislators* views of king, 552
doga and seigneurial regime, 46n, 119,126 Durkheim, Emile, 38% 577
DAle (town), 60 duties of lord, 19n, 20,120,133n, 139-41
Dohring(parish), 11% 2S2n eliminated by state expansion, 377, 565-67
domain of long, 62n for Tocqueville, 4,18-19, 33
domaine hunting, 120,122-2% 128
œngéabie, 83b Duval d’EprdmesnO, Jean-Jacques (legislator),
direct, 43-44 444n, 450n, 490n
664 INDEX
Eaux etForêts. See Water and Forest Adminis elections for, in Bnttany and Provence,
tration 357-59; lawyers elected to, 608-9; nobles
economic development See development, con elect nditary officers to, 39n; and peasant
cerns with movement, 143; as source of hope, 260;
economy, aixl delegitimation of seigneurial re status distinctions of, 197; voting proce
gime, 179-81 dures m, 21, 35-36, 38,170
Edelstein. Melvin. 311.366n, 422 Esves-le-Moutier (parish), 106
Eden TVeaty (1786). 355.376 Etain(bailliage), 121,547n
effects of Revolution, 589-90 Etampes (bailliage). 87,106a, 125
egalitarianismof nobility. 85n. Seealso hierarchy Etioles (parish), 130b
Egret. Jean, 81n, 336, 357-58 Europe, 473
elections, revolutionary, 311-12,336,365a, conflict of feudalismandifoerty in, 553
422 elite fear of mobilised peasants, 593
Elias, Norbert, 11 elite-driven reforms in, 590-94
elites andplebeians emancipation of peasants, 169-70,590-94
dialogue of, 117-18,520 enmity of, 14
in prerevolution, 265, 336 growing tension with Fiance, 3,14, 257b,
roles in revolutionary change, 582-84 331n, 471-74,582
See also dialogue See afro individual countries; war
Ells, Harold, 85n evasion
emancipations outside France, 591-94. See also of laws, 173
individualconmines vs. resistance, 212
embourgoisement of nobifity, 35 of seigneurial rights, 79
émigrés, 473, 481, 486 of taxation, 235
empkyUose, 53,526 event(s) (insurrectionary), 205-7, 209
enclosures, 174-75 constructing data file of, 206-7
Engels, Frederick, 567n évocation, 36
England, 260,449 exactions of church, 4,38,71,104,109-10. See
admired for toughness, 451 also abolition of ecrirsiaariral payments
food riots in, 242n, 376 expenditures of government, 35. See abo fi
purchasing French grain, 355 nances
as rival power, 393 extent of discussion of seqpieuriai regime, 148
threat of war with Spain, 470; 472-73
See also Eden TVeaty, Europe; Britain fairs and markets, seigneurial rights over
English and Great Fear, 260 abolitionof, 555
Enlightenment, 33n, 72,570 earty revolutionary législation about, 97
equity, 103-4, 574 grievances about, 51, 73, 82, 110-11, 117
and demands for reform, 103-10,133 opposed by physiocrats, 175-76
in parish cahiers, 572-73 Family Compact, 472-73
in taxation, 105,133,135 famine plot, 378
Escars, François-Nicolas-René de Férusse, Faubourg Saint-Antoine, 445n
comte d’ (legislator), 464n fealty and homage. See foi et hommage
Essay (village), 537n Federation movement, 419,426
estate management, 189 féodalité, 470,516
Estates-General fermiers, 54
of 1569, 456n fermocratie, 482n
of 1614, 21, 85, 266. See also cahiers of 1614 Ferrières, Charies-Ebe, marquis de (legislator),
of 1789,29; becomes National Assembly, 433-35, 439-40, 445n, 459n, 468, 498,
203-4; andconsciousness-raising, 139; 502-3
convocation of, 13, 20-21,61n, 85, on abolition of hereditary distinctions, 463
287-88, 327, 357-59, 493,499, 601,609; on his adhesion to actions of August 4 ,428n
Index 665
antipathy to clergy o(, 541-42 Figeac (town), 604

on democratization, 541 finance, 176n, 178-81
feigns enthusiasm for legislative actions, 444 fnances of state, 35-36,457,481, 512, 568
letters as source, 9 crisis of, 456
Ferro, Marc, 7 firearms. See arms, right to bear
Festival of Federation, 421. See also Federation fisbing/fishponds, seigneurial right to, 46
movement and agriculture in caters, 182
festivals in popular reigioaity, 306-9.See also abolitionof, 555
Sunday demands to reform, 110,121-24
feudal difficulty of indemnifying, 92-93
levies, 48 as target of insurrection, 222, 226, 227n
reaction, 17-18, 54,381, 527-30. Sit also See also recreational privieges of lords
arrears on seigneurial dues; refont; usurpa Fitch, Nancy, 409n, 420
tion, of land by lord Fitzsimmons, Michael, 555a
regfcne/rights, 168,268,427,429,467,473, Flanders, 9 ,116n, 509n
486, 511, 524, 576, 580; aboition decreed. Flour War(1775), 246-48,319n, 413n, 499,575
458-59; for Bamave, 189; incahiers, 148; fee et hommage, 44, 53n, 60, 84, 535
capitalist activities, intertwined with, 529; Fontenay (region of), 259
changing meanings of, 14,199n, 516-60, food riots. See subsistence events
586; in Cobban's view, 198-99, 595; com- Forcalquier (bailliage), 88
monsense meanings of abolition, 455,466, forest(s)
581; connected to other institutions, 522- communal rights in, 172-73
23; contracting the scope of, 525-27; dis economic significance of, 251
cussed inlegislature, 268,441,449; enlarg and insurrection, 251-52, 375, 393, 413
ing the scope of, 520-25; European as locus of lord-peasant conflict, 53, 55, 77,
hostility to France and, 14,471-74, 172-73, 251, 481, 498
477-78, 582; andfiefs, 44, 525-26; histori state forestry program, 251
ans' debates on, 10-11,145,162,169, See also conservation and landconflict; poach
180,198-99, 595; ideological construction ing; Water and Forest Administration
of, 585; insurrection buttresses critique of, Forster, Robert, 118n, 529n
290; and king, 551-52; meaning on night at on estate management, 83n, 189
August 4,163-65,189, 523; national mis on peasants as vassals and citizens, 143n
sion to end, 3, 470-71, 478-79, 504, 581; on seigneurial agents, 54
andproperty, 478,527; as retrograde, 189; Foucauld de Lanfimalfe, Louis, marquis de (leg
in revolutionary discourse, 354; search for islator), 490n
definition of, 519; seigneurial rights and, 5, Fox-Genovese, Elizabeth, 531n
189-90, 517-18; for Soboul, 180; source fnme-fief, 158,161
of injuries, 564; as totality, 558; transition Cobban’s daims about, 598-99
from, 559; like a tree, 467-68, 544; views grievances about, 36,100
of French general on, 478; for Vbltaire,
and privilege, 198
200; and war, 473,477; See also abolition
and seigneurial regime in eaten, 158-59
of feudal regime; seigneurial regime
feudistes, 53, 126, 381, 599 Franche-Comté, 116n, 158n, 434,448n, 458n,
Feuille Villageoise, 546 562
fief(s), 44, 520, 525-26 convocation of Estates-General in, 359n
defended, 531 indemnification in practice in, 95n, 597n
grievances, 53, 59-60, 531 serfdom in, 52, 76-77, 550
in Merlin’s rhetoric, 535 Franzosi, Roberto, 211
nobility holding. 357-59,425 free-market programs
rarely defended incaters, 60, 540 characteristic of Third Estate demands,
role in convocation: in Franche-Comté, 359n; 35-36, 50-54,181,178-79,188-89,
in Provence, 357-59,425 243-44, 514,596
666 INDEX
impact oo western France, 355 change over time, 354-61

under Old Regime, 247 counterrevolution, 206a 344-46, 348,352,
under Revolution, 243-44,250,483,506,512 365,418, 421
Set also capitalismin countryside; Eden distributions, ovenl, 342
ïïeatjr, market, development of national; early western activism, 355
physiocracy/physiocrats; subsistence landconfbcts, 351
events major north/south differences, 342-44,363,
"fragging." seigneurial right, 49.458 368
Fronde, 265 methodologicalissues, 408-9
Furet, François, 61a 279n panics, 352,354
challenges Marxists, 595 regional distinctiveness, 418
on elite conceptual radicalism, 583, 594 religious events, 366
on night of August 4, 587 spatiotemporal patterns, 354-61,425,580
on revolutionary orators, 146n subsistence events, 351-52,355,360-61
Fttmtnpajsa/mts, 424 wage events, 351
■SataLut mrtwt« rJ inMinwriwi- trajectories
gabelk, 36-37,100-101,162, Tibie 2.1
of insurrection
and anti-guMfr actions, 348-51
and public services, 106o Gérard, Alain, 350n
not reformable, 101-2 Germans and Great Fear, 260
revolutionary legislation on, 349n Germany, 242a 470-73,478-79, 581,592. Set
and smuggling, 240 also individualGtnmm states
variation in rates, 348-51 Gien (bailliage), 87,122
Ser also anti-tax events; General Farms/ Gtflard, André, 114
General Fanners; taxation, indirect; salt- Gironde (département), 95n
smugglingandinsurrection Girondins. 207,467,477-78,482,486
Gaihis, Manfred, 242n gîte, 53n
Gabda, 592 gleaning, 172,252
GaUfet, comte de, 226n God as source of authority, 35,85, 223,464a
galows, 83n 539-41, 547, 559-60, 571, 607
andhierarchy, 224n Gddard, Jacques, 9, 27, 441-42,461a 469,
in insurrections, 57,224, 248, 507 491, 543, 545-46,603-6
as status markers, 47,127 on villagers' use of legalese, 607
and trees of liberty, 224 Godechot, Jacques, 387n
Ser abo symbolization of status Gohier, Louis-Jérôme (legislator), 478
game. Ser capitaineries; deer as royal animals; Goldstone, Jack, 567n
duties of lord; game wardens as target of Golzart, N. C. Oegishtor), 475-76
insurrection; hunting, seigneurial right of; Gothic, 524
poaching Goubert, Pierre, 2,3, 54,385
game wardens as target of insurrection, 499. OQtrßM/bocage contrast exaggerated, 386n
Ser afro antiseigneurial events Goqjard, Philippe, 234-35
Garaud, Marcel, 80a 90n
Goupil de Préfelne, Gu&aume-Ftançois-Chartes
Gard (département), 206a 331
Gauvile, Louis-Henri-Charles, baronde (legisla (legislator), 552
tor), 432a 434-35 Gourdon (region around), 479a 603
GemonviDe (parish), 121 troops deal with maypoles, 442
General Farms/General Farmers, 102-3, Gourin (region around), 350
107-8,162 Gramproduction and insurrectioa 375-76
geography of insurrection, 337-426, 568 grassland. See contexts of insurrectioa pasture;
antiseigneurial events, 13, 228a 288-89, grazing rights; pasture/pasturage; stock-
346, 351-52, 357, 360-65, 415, 418, 424, raising
580 grazing rights, 252,391. See abo contexts of
anti-taxevents, 348-52 insurrectioa pasture; paramnr, pasture/
Index 667
pasturage; stock-rasing troupeauápart; Hampaoq Nonnaa 137n

tamepâture Han-devant-Pierrepont (parish), 122
Great Fear. 207-8,260,302,360,378,382a Hannover, 591, 593
388,396.398,429 harvest of 1788, 259. Ser also Labrousse
on atypical days for mobfezations, 332 Haute-Garonne ((Upárteme*!), 477
diffusion of news about, 272a 436 Havré et de Crôy, Joseph-Anne-Auguste-
and good roads, 381-82 Maxmùliea duc d’ (legislator), 464n
and invaders, 4-5, 260 Helvetic Republic, 592
andnucleated villages, 388-89 Heming (parish), 108
and other insurrections, 413-14 Henneboot (baüüagt), 125,181
partly averted by literacy, 383,411 Henri IV, 472
partly explained by prices, 411 Henrion de Panaey, Pierre-Paul-Nioolas, 548a
rapicfity of spread, 259,436 549n
and scarcity, 374 Hérault (département), 206n
as vaccine against later panics, 414 Hervé, Frmçois, 59
Seealso panics Hesse. 591
Grégoire, Baptiste-Henri (legislator), 562,603n Hesse. Phüppe-Jeaa 504n
on language, 524 Hesse-Cassd, 593
on peasant uprisings, 545 Hesse-Darmstadt, landgrave ai, 470-71
on tithe legislation, 445 hierarchy, 14-15, 21, 35, 78.84-85,165,532
on trees of liberty, 324a 418-19 as basis for social order, 539-42
on vandalism, 544n defense of, 530-31
Grelet de Beauregard, Jean-Baptiste (legisla in feudal theory, 44,84
tor), 537 in gallows architecture, 224n
on deference, 502n lawsuits over, 84n
Grenoble, 287 and night of August 4, 587-88
Gresset, Maurice, 607n as noble concent, 61-62,86,197, 570, 575
grievance Ests. Set cahiers of 1789 and seigneurial rights, 169,532
grievances, 5-8,11-12,16-202,366-67, Sec also honor honorific rights
569-77. See also agendas in cakterr, nobi- highjustice, 83a 121, 224
ity, peasants; programs of nobility, Third Higonnet, Patrice, 510n
Estate andpeasants in cahiers; Third His (parish), 39
Estate HI, Christopher, 589
Grostenquin (parish), 122 Hincker, François, 37a 134
Gueniffey, Patrice, 436n Hirsch, Jean-Pierre, 227n
Guérande (city), 346 historians on peasants in Revolutioa 9-11,
Guéret (bailliage), 502n 14-16, 289-90,338-39, 371-72, 373-74,
kgutí et ¡a garde, 53a 62-63 582-83
Guichen (village), 420-21 history, sacred and social, 521, 559-60
gidds.22,431n hoarders as targets of insurrection, 246
and Lawof August 4-11 (1789), 555 Hollander, Paul d\ 420n
and seigneurial rights in cahiers, 164-65 Holy Roman Empire, 470-71. See also Austria
on night of August 4,163, 431 honor, 117,121,192,198
GuBcksoa Gay, 376n abolished as leply enforceable daim, 462,
Gutton, Jean-Pierre, 225 554-55
andantiseigneurial legislation, 585
Guyenne, 226n
as defense of prerogatives, 171,197,463,
575-76
Hainaut, 51a 434 defended by claimof property, 202
Halévi, Raa 146a 583 and income for nobdity, 190-98
Ham(town), 238 noble attachment ta 47-50, 56-57, 80-82,
Hamdtari, Marie-Claude al, 311 128,461,464
668 INDEX
in parishcahiers, 78n iconography of Revolution, 489n

and seigneurial justice, 113-14 ignorance of peasants, 20, 2430,435,489-91.
Seealso hierarchy; honorific rights; nobÄty; 496-97, 542-43, 545-46, 588,603-6
property; symbofizationof status De-de-France, 116a See also Paris region
honorific rights, 49, 82,830,190-91, 475,570 income of lord, and honor, 202
abolished, 460,554 Les mconvtniens des droitsfiodaux, 89
defended, 83,197-98 indemnification, 13, 88-98, 428,440a 491,
distinct from lucrative rights for nobles, 494-95, 531, 573-74,610
191-94, 576 advocated for some rights, 132-33
and noble discussions of hierarchy, 197 Boncerf’s advocacy of, 89
peasant grievances about, 78, 554, 574 as characteristic demand of Third Estate,
as property, 197-98 70-72,89
religious character of, 155-56 criticized by Couthon, 475
and tax advantages of nobility, 196 derived from natural law, 541
Set also hierarchy; honor nobdity; property; differences between peasants andThird Es
symbolization of status tate, 89,94
hospitality, coerced, 248 feasibility of, 91-94,574
Hufton, Otwen, 114 ■i Lawof August 4-11 (1789), 430
humiliation, 104n in Lawof Mardi 15-28 (1790), 460
as seigneurial right, 49 and National Assembly, 94,449
of serfdom, 78 and night of August 4,457
role in night of August 4, 458, 554 of payments to lord, 91-92,554
See also honor peasant support for, 90-94
Hungary, 592 in practice, 95a 597
hunger and insurrection, 227,246,373-75, rates of, 89, 95a 457a 462.504, 534,598
411-12 reasons for supporting, 88,94-95,201,
Hunt, Lynn, 14-15, 267-68, 422 459-60,534
critique of MarxianandIbcquevilean narra reduction in scope of, 465
tives, 567 as smokescreen to maintainseigneurial
bunting, seigneurial right of 226,496,599n rights, 89-90, 583, 596
abolitionof, 555 andtithe, 109
and agriculture incahiers, 182 industry, 176a 178-81,376
damage caused by, 119 informatioa role in insurrection of, 272. Set
defiance of lord’s rights, 119-20, 226, 227n alsonews
demands to reform, 110-11,118-24 innovation in contestatioa 255-56,321-24,
grievances about, 38, 45-46, 56, 58,62, 327,331-35, 423,425-26
73-76, 80,110-11,119-24 atypical seasonal patterns, 326-31
guard as target of insurrection, 122,499 See also organization; rhythms of insurrec
as honorific, 191 tion; seasonality
indemnification of, 92-93 instruction, as route to rural padficatioa
king’s and lord’s, 123,162 450-51, 543, 545-46, 606
lucrative aspect of, 191-92 insurrectiondata 206-12
on night of August 4,163, 429n available information for, 210-11
opposed by physiocrats, 175-76 evasion and resistance as problems ia
reduces peasant income, 52 213-14
andas seigneur's duty, 120,128 biases; of historians, 214; of sources, 216-17;
as target of insurrection, 498 of data 219
See also arms, right to bear; capitaineries; problems of sources for, 204-5
poaching; recreational privileges of lords; temporal boundaries of data colectan, 207
symbolizationof status See also methodology, issues of
Hysiop, Beatrice, 28n insurrectionCs), 1,11,156,413,433, 577-80
Index £
O£TûO
and actions of authorities, 262-64 interaction. See dialogue

and breakdown of Old Regime, 288 intraconmunal conflict, 482-85,510
and dass conflict, 314 invasions of fields, 251
andprice increases, 374-75 invention of France, 142
changing character OÍ, 12-13,16,42,58, investigation of peasants by government, 485,
262-63, 280-86, 298, 580 491, 543, 545-46, 603-6
contribution to humanadvance cfaalenged, investment, discouraged by rural 173
590 Isnard, Maximin (legislator), 473
early in Revolution, 355 Isoré, Jacques (legislator), 468,544
in fourteenth and seventeenth centuries, Issy-TEvêque (village), 420
228-29
geographic aspects of, 8,12,33-34,337- Jacob, Jean (serf), 561-63
426,580 Jacobins, 31In, 320,422a 509
impact of Lawof March 15-28 (1790), on Jessenne, Jean-Pierre, 228a 336,482n
targets of, 504 Jesus, as model taxpayer, 108
impact on legislators, 145-46,447-50,475, Jews, 40, 232
487-89, 512 Jones, Cotia 607n
information and, 272 Jones, Pieter. 327a 351,386a 466a 482a
long-term change in targets and tactics, 529a S90n
574-75 Joseph II (Austria), 592n
major forms of, 218-19 journalism, 491-94
news readies legislators, 428,435-38 judges as targets of msunectioa 222
organizational vehicles, 311-12 Julia Dominique, 310
in Paris, 278,482 juring clergy as targets of msunectioa 232
peaks and troughs, 295-99, 436,494 jurists. See lawyers.
quantity of, 2 justice
inseventeenthandeighteenthcenturies, 3-4, expense of, in cahiers, 167-68
12,16, 42, 229, 264, 269, 423-24, 578 as honorable, 113-14
spread o£ 578 as legitimate activity to peasants, 113-14
support for, outside of France, 478 notables confidence in, 124
tradition of anti-tax contention, 264 seigneurial: in Brittany, 168a in early revolu
traditional seasonality of, 326 tionary legislatioa 96, 460a economic
trouble legislators, 447 value of, 191; and enforcement of lord’s
western distinctiveness, 361-367 claims, 83a 93,114-16; grievances about,
variety of forms and targets of, 4,8, 203-69, 38, 73, 83,110-17, 573; and indemni&a-
411,423 tioa 93; on night of August 4,163; in
Set also anti-authority events; antiseigneurial practice, 114-16; and prerevolutionary re
forma 117, 54; and reform demanda
events; anti-tax events; coats-of-arms;
110-18, 573; and royal justice, 120; and
cfaurdibenches; contexts of insurrection;
royal reforma 549; seigneurialjustice as
counterrevolution; documents as targets of status distinctioa 86,113-14
insurrection; gallows; geography erfinsur
rection; innovation in contestation; insur kairos. Set momentous time
rection data; land conflicts; organization; Kapha Steven, 244n
panics; peaks of conflict; religious events; Karéiew, Nikolai, 82n
rhythms of insurrection; subsistence Kennedy, Michael, 311n
events; symbolization of status; titles, sei Kessel, Patrick, 431
gneurial; trajectories of insurrection; trees king, 450
of liberty; turrets as targets ofinsurrection; deer reserved for, 123
wage events; waves of insurrection; weath- as divinely consecrated, 559-60
ervanes as seigneur, 51,162
intendant, 105,198 debate on control over army by, 451
670 INDEX
displace« seigneurial authority, 48 rection; geography of msurrectioo; msur-

not linkedto seigneurial regne incahien, 200 tectionfs); peaks of conflict; trajectories of
royal property as issue, 456a 481 insurrection; waves of insurrection
weakened by Lawof August 4-11 (1789), 555 legislation of Revolution, 451,481-86
See also Louis XVI; monarchy; National redistribution. Illa 482a Ser abo agrarian
Property law; common landand ratal conflict; dtvi-
Kmtianskoe dvieheme, 207-8,219n skmof commons
Kuntzig (parish), 121 sale. See National Property
Kusdnski, August, 609n tenure, 451, 481-86; and seigneurial regne
in eakiers, 52-53,177-78
La Bruyère. Jean de, 490n Landcnberg-Wagenbourg. Jean-Bapdste-Marie-
La CaiDère (village), 259 Eusèbe-Hermam, baron de (legislator),
La Marche, 116 464n
laboratory, France as, 368-69 Lana Frederic, 135
laborers Langlois, Claude, 390n
migratory character of, 293,394-95 language, 342,524
organizations and insurrection, 310 Languedoc, 80,116,379,395,398,409n
scarcities of, and conscription, 293-94 autonomous communities ia 385
and wage events, 351 Latmion(bailliage), 49
Labrousse, CamiDe-Ernest, 371-64,411 Laon
Lachiver, Marcel, 393 bailliage, 128,167
Lacretelle, Charles, 428n city, 349
Lafayette, Marie-Joseph-Paul-Yvea-Roch- LaqueuiDe, Jean-Chtude-Marie-Victor, marquis
Gübert du Moder, marquis de (legislator), de (legislator), 464n
550 LaRochefoucauld-Liancourt, François-Alexan
Lafly-Toiendal, Itophime-Gérard, comte de dre Frédéric, duc de (legislator), 550
(legislator), 439a 550 Lassay (parish), 107
condemns antiseigneurial legislation, 445 Lauzerte (region around), 442,603
on night of August 4, 432 Lavoisier, Antoine-Laurent, 160
Lambert, Claude-Guillaume, baron de Chemer- Lawof
eOes (controller-general), 239 August 4-11 (1789), 446a 462-63. 474-76,
Lameth, Alexandre-Théodore-Victor, chevalier 493, 547, 554, 581, 594; cahiers and, 573-
de (legislator), 432a 448-49, 457a 463a 74; delay in implementation of, 517; differ
491 ing interpretations of, 431-32, 444-49,
Lameth, Charies-Malo-Fkançois, comte de (leg 455a 459-60, 533; distinction of abofition
islator), 444n va indemnification ia 430; insurrections'
Lamoignon reform program of 1788,117,471, role in impelling, 593; Louis XVTs obstruc
549 tion of, 511, 551-54; as promise, 430-32
land March 15-28 (1790), 96-98, 443a 455,
conflicts, 5, 218-19, 220, 255, 296, 351,407, 462-63, 465, 466a 474, 476, 493, 504,
507-8, 511, 537, 554, 557, 562, 585; ca
467, 481; antifeudal elements, 254,482-
hiers and, 97-99, 461-62,573-74; as com
83; andconservation, 251-52; changing na promise, 544; distinguishes among sei
ture of, 294-95; geographic aspects of, gneurial rights, 460; peasants alter
351,418; insurrectionary peaks, 275,278; insurrectionary tactics in response ta 504
mtracommunal conflicts, 253-54,482-84, April 14-20 (1790), 480
581; invasions of fields, 251; monastery as May 3-9 (1790), 462, 474,476, 481, 504,
target, 251, 483; Northeast, 367; organiza 511, 554, 562, 596n
tion of, 321-22; and, 351; role of usurpa May 14-17 (1790), 481
tion in, 251; seigneur as target, 220,251, June 19 (1790), 462-63, 585; as response to
254,483; on Sundays, 314, 319-20; vari peasant mobdizatkm, 463. See also symbol
ety of, 250-56. See also contexts of insur ization ai status
Index 671
November 14-16 (1790). 464 Le Guen de Kérangal, Guy-Gabriel-François-

December 1-12 (1790). 480 Marie (legislator), 458
April 13-20 (1791), 464. 538 Le Mans (baüUagt). 350, 360
September 28-October 6 (1791), 484 Le Roy Ladurie, Emmanuel, 3-4,16,42, 239,
June 18-July 6 (1792), 465, 538 264,268-69
August 20 (1792). 465, 478, 538-39 Lefebvre, Georges, 9-10,19-20, 40,158n,
August 25 (1792), 455,465,478,494,505-6, 249, 259-60, 298, 529n, 533
510, 538, 581,603; leads to feting of anti- on capitalismin countryside, 77n, 189, 556
seigneurial events, 498 on Groat Fear, 207-208, 378,381-82,413,
August 28-September 14 (1792), 481 414n
June 3 (1793), 482n on peasant burdens, 17
Jute 10 (1793), 482, 486 on peasant role in Revolution, 289
July 17 (1793), 455, 467-68, 482, 488, 494, Lefrançois, Joseph-Etienne-Benolt (legislator),
505n, 512, 538-39, 553, 597n 445
September 13 (1793), 482n left, inNationalAssembly, 446
October 2 (1793), 469 Legendre, Laurent-Francis (legislator), 490
bar schools, 607 legislation
lawyers, 53,180-81,429,458n, 525 as context for peasant actions, 411,425-26,
activism of, 435, 562n, 609 489-508
as agents of seigneurs, 2, 53-54, 228» 477n, impact of peasant actions on, 489-507
556,609-10 major turning points in, 493-94
attempt precise definition of feudal, 525-27 resembles cahiers demands, 96-96
conceptualizationof seigneurial rights, 43—45, See also Convention; Legislative Assembly;
532n, 533, 536, 538, 548n legislators; National Assembly; specific 1am
culture of legal professionalism of, 586 Legislative Assembly, 3 ,485n
and customary law, 45 antifeudal: discourse of, 354; legislation of,
feudal manuals for, 44-45, 46a, 47n, 49,60, 478
78n, 79n, Uln, 126» 140-41,156, 532, debates seigneurial rights, 449,476
536, 539-40, 548n, 610-11 deputies criticise National Assembly, 475-76
grievances about, 40 discusses disturbances, 244n, 546
habits of categorization of, 517 gets news of insurrections, 465
indemnification’s appeal to, 201 inAugust 1792,466
and language of property andcontract, 189 modifies earlier legislation, 557
and lawsuits of rural communities. 133n, 253, number of lawyers in, 609
466n, 607 under wartime pressure, 538
inlegislatures, 96,124n, 467,477,490,502n, Seealso Committee on Feudal Rights (Legisla
509n, 602,607-11 tive Assembly); Diplomatic Committee
influence in village, 108,139, 586-87 (Legislative Assembly); Lawof. June 18-
medieval terminology of, 528 July 6 (1792); Lawof August 20 (1792);
nobles familiar with, 586 Lawof August 25 (1792); legislation; legis
peasants familiar with, 107,139, 586
lators
professional language diffuses, 604
propose legal procedures, 124 legislators, 427-557
as representatives, 608-9 attempt to embody Revolution, 426
revolutionary role of, 607-11 abundance of sources on, 8, 204
role in Third Estate, 40,130, 609 antiseigneurial¡8moC 557
See alsofeudistes; lawschools; litigation; man and commonsense meanings of their rheto
uals of seigneurial rights; notaries ric, 581
Lay-St-Christophe (parish), 123,160n consider repression, 448-49
Le Bras, Hervé, 142 discuss rural revolt, 448-50
Le Chapelier, Isaac-René-Guy (legislator), 487, “feudal" in vocabulary of, 145-46
511 hope for compromise, 509-10
672 INDEX
impact of rural turbulence oo, 417-18, 429b, Btqp linn

435, 4461). 443-44. 461». 463. 466, 481, and antisefeieuriafiani, 252-53
487-89, 496, 512 duringeighteenthcentury, 498
andking, 438, 547-54 encouraged by Lawof March 15-28 (1790),
andrural labor, 486 460
and new rural order, 2 lack of research on, 466n
and opportunities for peasant action, 511-12, peasants vs. lords, 133b, 173,253,607
581 as remedy, promoted by Third Estate, 120,
aaseigneurs, 595 130,573
taxation concerns of, 449-56 under revolutionary law, 466n
variety of positions amonft 508 ¡■fldirim (bailliage), 116, 252n
various views of Lawof August 4-11 (1789), localism incahiers, 137-39
.444-48 Loche, John, 34
See also Convention; Legislative Assembly; tods et ventes, 38,57
legislation; NationalAssembly; specific laws demands to reform, 125
LeGofL T. J. A., 294, 590n in early revolutionary legislation, 97
Lehodey de SauKchevreuil, Etienne, 492n symbolic aspects of, 82n
Lemarchand, Guy, 216n, 250, 264, 320, 574 Seralso mutationfees
data collection of, 307, 309, 320 logomachy. Revolution as, 545
evidence on disturbances (1661-1789), 204-5 Longuyon (bailliage), 122
on peasant role in Revolution, 290 lord. See seigneur
on subsistence conflicts, 247n lord-church nexus, 47,158
Leroay, Edna Hindie, 124n, 459n mcahiers, 154-56
Lemerrier de la Rivière, Pierte-Phul-Ftançoi»- as target of insurrection, 156, 222,499
Joachim-Henri, 34n Voltaire criticizes, 199-200
Lepoutre, Pierre-François (legislator), 509n weakened, 541-42
lettres de cachet, 29, 86 Ser also durchbenches; symbofiaationof
Léay-Mamésia, Claude-François-Adrien, status
marquis de (legislator), 434-35 Lai(département)
Liancourt, duc de. See La Rochefoucauld- persistence of insurrection in, 441-42
Liancourt report on disturbances in, 603-6
liberalism. 33, 243, 508, 512, 522, 572 Louis XVI 447, 451, 540n, 555
liberty afigmnent with defenders of feudal regime,
and property, 34 548
as noble concern, 570 antifeudal measures of, 76,434,439,
Lieberson, Stanley, 72n 548-50,590
Limoges (bailliage), 82-83, 85-86,167,600 deconstructs privilege, 169
Limousin, 95n, 391n, 395,420,422n, 461 embraces new order, 531, 553
conscription of absent workers m, 293 fight to Varermes, 249,331
insurrections in, 299 foflowspolitique dupire, 446n
Tard-avisés ai, 424 and Nootka Sound inrident, 472
Lindet, Robert-Thomas (deputy), 490 obstruction of antifeudal measures, 514,
fears: agrarianlaw, 485n; summer distur 551-54
bances, 326 orders participationin National Assembly, 438
literacy persisting support for, 540-41, 553
andanti-taxevents, 383 restorer of French liberty, 427,429,524,550
as cause of Revolution, 411 on rural disturbances, 546
as context for revolt, 338,382-83,407, 411, tensions with legislature, 547-48,551-54
413 Ser also king; monarchy
and Great Fear, 383, 411 Louvet, Jean-Baptiste (legislator), 473n, 477
regional variations in, 342 Lozère (département), 365n
Index 673
Lubersac, Jean-Baptiste-Joseph de, bishop of as generator of Revolution, 14-15

Chartres (legislator), 88n, 429n impact on seigneurs, 77, 528
Lucas, Cohn, 263, 320 and seigneurial rights in eaUers, 187
on antirevolution, 365n and subsistence events, 243
on violence against persons, 248-49 Third Estate demands about barriers to,
lucrative rights, 190-91 35-36, 50-54, 570-71
distinct from honorific rights in noble cahiers, See also free-market programs
191-94 marketplace, 564-65
LQsebrink, Hans-Jflrgen, 606n invasion on large scale, 245n
LuxeuO(abbey), 77n as locus for conflict, 244-46,310n
Lyon (bailliage), 180n and subsistence events, 245,314n
Mariy-h-Ville (parish), 78n, 81n
Mackrefl, John, 38, 76,179, 522n Marseille, 331n, 365n, 421
on antiseigneurial fantasies, 200n martial law, 448-49, 491
on economic thinkers, 175,176n Marx, Karl, 388, 529n
on new economic order, 180 on genesis of bourgeois revolution, 180
Mâcon (region of), 158n, 228n geological theory, 410
Maggiolo, Louis, 383n on inevitability of revolution, 567n
maL See trees of liberty on rational collective action, 389
MaOhe, Jean-Baptiste (legislator), 474,477 on smallholders, 384
on national mission to end feudalism, 478-79 Seealso Marxian tradition; narratives of Revo
Maine, 9, 418 lution: Marxianaccount
vast subsistence movement in, 245n Marxian tradition, 14-15, 266,512-14
mainmorte, 51-52,521 on break with past, 199
abolished by king, 549 concerned withantiseigneuriatism, 236
as lucrative right, 191 debated by Furet, 595
as protection, 77 limited anticipation in cahiers oí, 200
in early revolutionary legislation, 97 on role of market, 35
on night of August 4,163 on work patterns, 384
opposed by physiocrats, 175-76 See also Marx, Karl; narratives of Revolution:
real and personal confounded, 538 Marxianaccount
maintenance of seigneurial rights, demands for, Mass (Catholic), 314-21
72-89 as organizational locus for insurrection,
Malouet, Pierre-Victor (legislator), 445n 308-10
Mamers (bailliage), 350 Massif Central, 365n
Mantes (bailliage), 162n material daims, symbolic significance of, 82n
manuals of seigneurial rights, 44-45, 46n, 47n, Mathiez, Albert, 368n, 431n
49, 59, 78n, 79n, llln , 126, 140-41,156, Matthews, George, 159n
532, 536, 539-40, 548n, 610-11 Maupeou reforms of 1771,549
on duties of lord, 140-41 Maupetit, Michel-René (legislator), 468
Merlin’s, 610-11 Maury, Jean-Siffrein (legislator), 450n
on rights as property, 536 maypoles. See trees of liberty
manufacturing. See industry Mazancourt, Gabriel-Auguste, comte de (legis
Marat, Jean-Paul (legislator), 446,486 lator), 464n
Maréchal, Pierre-Sylvan, 610n Maza, Sarah, 589n, 608n
Marichausie, 48n Mazauric, Claude, 524
Marion, Marcel, 239 McPhee, Peter, 409n, 529n
market, development of national, 35,359,568 MeadweD, Hudson, 19
as cause of Revolution, 14-15, 410 MéauUe, Jean-Nicolas (legislator), 467
as context of revolt, 99,174-75, 338, Meaux (bailliage), 87n
375-76, 380-82, 399,407-8, 579 Mecklenberg, 591
674 INDEX
Mediterranean coast, 387,396,407 content analysis of caters, 23-25,57n

Mehm (baüüagt), 119,157 contexts of revolt, coding data on, 338,
Menou, Jacques-François, bann de (legislator), 371n,380n
472-73 counterfactual speculation, 590
mercantilists, 51 defining: an insurrectionaryevent, 205-7;
merchants as target of insurrection, 246 France’s regions, 339-41
Merlin (de Douai), Ptdippe-Antoine (legislator), distinguishing subjects andactions in caters.
440n, 467, 469.476-77,496-97,526,535, 67n
537, 556-57, 607 estimating time for news to travel, 437n
on annexation of Belgium, 479n evaluatingprice data, 374n
briKant legal mind of, 490, 588 hidden popular resistance as data problem,
as coauthor of manual of seigneurial rights, 213-14
536 interpreting scarce mention of seigneurial
condescension toward unenlightened, 490 agents, 54n
condemns Convention’s legislation, 467-68 laboratory, France as, 368-69
criticizes local officials, 442n in literacy data, 383n
defines feudal regime, 525-27 late date of some geographic data, 388
distinguishes categories of rights, 455,462 mappingcounterrevolution, 257
justifies spoliation of Germanprinces, 471 measuring: associations mentors, 147; price
legislation on serfdom, 461 increases, 375n
magician, 545 pays <TitatsJpaysdilations classification, 377n
on promulgation of Laut of August 4-11 regional covariations, problems of interpreta
(1789), 551n tion, 369-70
on property and feudal rights, 469 samplingeaters, 28-29,146n, 216n, 358,
ponders continuing peasant disturbances, 366,54In
443, 447, 542-44 significance of undiscovered insurrectionary
prerevolutionary career of, 2,533 events, 409n
rationale for revolutionary laws, 475, 533-42 Taylor’s analysis of caters compared, 67n
revolutionary career of, 610-11 trajectories of contention, 270-71
on significance of night of August 4 ,443n understanding strategic speech, 600-603
treaties of kings vs. treaties of peoples, 472 urban population size, 380n
Merritt, Richard, 6-7 Metz (bailliage), 122
messianism in Brazil, 412 migration, 395,407
methodology, issues of, 58n, 346, 406-9 nabtary concerns, 35-36,39,83n, 166-67,196,
absence of clerical caters in sample, 146n, 257n. Sec also conscription; desertion; mi
541n litia
adequacy of sources on insurrection, 206 militia, 39,420
alleviating biases of data, 216-17, 236-37 miler, as target of insurrection, 246
assessing plebeian views in past, 6-7 milling, seigneurial monopoly of, 38k 51, 79,
benchmark comparisons, 598,600 117-18, 222, 596n
biases: in data on anti-tax events, 234-37, demands to reform, 110
296n, 578; of insurrection data, 204-5, Mirabeau, André-Boniface-Louis de Riquetti,
211-17 vicomte de (legislate»’), 603
cahiers as sources, 25-28 Mirabeau, Honoré-Gabriel de Riquetti, comte
Cobban’s quasi-quantitative statements, 596, de (legislator), 472n. 552, 562
599n Môecourt (bailliage), 599-600
coding: road information, 380n; urbanpopula misery thesis, 371,374-75
tion size, 380n mission of nation to end feudalismin Europe, 3,
comparative treatment of rural emancipa 470-71, 478-79, 504, 581
tions, 591n, 594n misunderstanding as form of resistance. 493,
comparisons, systematic, 11-12 602
Index 675
Mitchd, C. J., 475n Mousnier, Roland, 424

Mitterand, François, 589 mouvance, 44n
model cahiers, 493 movements, social
Moktard (parish). 120-21.181-82.187-88 as field of research, 584-85
momentous time. 412-13, 440, 515,517, organizational capacities oh 273
520-21. 523, 556. 558-60, 581 spatiotemporal patterns oh 419-20
mmankms, 550 Münster, TVeatyof (1648), 470-71
monarchy, 524 Muguet de Nanthou, Hyacinthe-Françcis-Felix
empowered by God, 85 (legislator), 552
and feudal regime in cahiers, 548, 576 mutationfees
in noble cahim, 86 abolition oh 476-77
overthrown, 363, 465,485n and agriculture, 182-83
requires status distinctions, 83 indemnification, 91,93
and Revolution, 3 grievances about, 38, 50, 57, 73,82,91,93,
and seigneurial rights, 87, 200 124-25,182,187
unraveling support for, 547-54 in early revolutionary législation, 97
See also king; Louis XVI opposed by physiocrats, 175-76
monasteries, 157 restrict property sales, 181-82
as lord, 222 Set also (ods et ventes
as seriholders, 200
it target, 4 ,226n, 229, 246-47,251, 290, Nancy (bailliage), 123,160n
483 Napoleon, 486-87, 555,611
as usurper of land, 251 narratives of Revolution
Monday actions on, 310-11 Marxian account, 3 ,19n, 14-15, 35,199,
monopolies of seigneur, 571n, 599n 236, 267-68, 512-14, 563-65, 567,
abolition erf, 555 570-71, 579, 583, 598
in early revolutionary legislation, 97-98 IbcqueviDean account, 14-15,19n, 267-68,
grievances about, 36,38, 46-47, 50-51, 58, 359, 385, 565-67, 569-71, 579
73, 82n, 91, 93,110, 522 Ser also Marx, Karl; Marxian tradition; Tbc-
indemnification, 91, 93 queviUe, Alexis de; IbcqueviDean tradition
Ser also milling, seigneurial monopoly of; National Assembly, 3,9, 34n, 132n, 162-63,
oven, seigneurial monopoly oh winepress, 203-4, 427-61, 466, 490n, 551
seigneurial monopoly of dergy in, 146n, 444-45
Monsieur Nicolas, 586 composition of, 509,609
Mont-Jura, 561 conditions of work of, 459n
Montastruc-la-cooselère (parish), 156n considers repressive strategy, 439
Montauban, 604 constituent-delegate relationship, 436
Montesquieu, Charles de Secondât, baron de la criticized in Legislative Assembly, 475
Brède et de, 530, 544 death penalty discussed in, 441
on honorific distinctions, 87 debates war andpeace, 472-73
Montlosier, François-Dominique de Reynaud, destroys the feudal regime inits entirety, 427
chevalier de (legislator) differences among deputies in, 439-40
on hostility to Loufo XVI, 551-52 early legislation of, 97-98
on night of August 4, 444n, 490 geographic origins ofJacobins in, 422n
peasants as unthinking, 496 gets peasant petitions, 239
Montpellier (.bailliage), 164n honors ex-serf, 561-63
Montreul-sur-Mer (bailliage), 157 indemnification legislation in, 94,430,
Moore, Barrington, S29n 457-60, 462, 464, 466, 581
Moors, and Great Fear, 260 wiDinstruct people, 491
Moulins, 469 investigates rural violence, 441-42
mountainous area as context of revolt, 407,413 judicial legislation in, 460n
676 INDEX
and king, 327, 547-48,551-54 caters anticipate, 49n, 162-69,199

lawyers in, 609 clergy's role on, 146n
Le Chapeberas president of, 487 eternally celebrated, 432
left in, 487 Furet on, 587
news of actions of August 1789,495 and Germanprinces, 471
polarizationin, 444-46 indemnification rate proposed on, 457n
and property rights, 34n, 428, 448-49,457, meaning of feudalism on, 189
461, 476-78, 517, 531-33, 606 Mirabeau’s absence from, 472n
recognizes nditias, 419-20 news spreads quickly, 496
right in, 444-46 as nobility’s suicide, 495-96
on taxation, 349 See also Lawof: August 4-11 (1789); Na
See also Committee on Feudal Rights: Na tional Assembly
tional Assembly; night of August 4; legisla Nîmes
tors; legislatures; specific hues baiUiage, 546
National Guards, 244n, 311-12,336,389,421n, region of, 232
429n, 441, 443, 511 Nivernais et Donzois (baUUagt), 87,530
affiliate with one another, 421 Noailes, Louis-Marie, vicomte de (legislator),
antiseigneurial actions of, 365n, 479n 445n, 457-58,534-35
challenge counterrevolution, 257n in debate on repressive measures, 441
diffusion of, 419-21 first speaker on night of August 4,428,430
formation in 1789,382 speaks on militias, 420n
as insurrectionary strike force, 320,360n, nobility, 13. 28,166-67,179-80
365n, 420-21, 479n, 580 agenda in caters, 29-35,37,39,47-50,
in Marseille, 331n, 365n, 421 55-64,569-70
Parisian model, 425 and assembly of 1717, 85n
and subsistence movement, 244,360n concern with: dvi liberties, 29,33,35,568;
mvflages, 425-26 state finances, 35, 568
See also Federationmovement conservatism of, 79-86, 201,455, 572
National Property, 255,331,481-86,557 defense of seigneurial rights, 67,80-88,
and financial crisis, 254n, 456 530-33, 575-76
and seigneurial rights, 457,464,597n Hwiunih controls on state, 29,33,35,
natural law, 541 569-70
nature as source of status distinctions, 464n devotion to kmgincaters, 540-41
Necker, Jacques (controller-general), 102,165, differences with: peasants’ views, 138; Third
348n, 456 Estate views, 79, 85-88,152,190-91,
on serfdom, 76n, 544n 194,202,596
Nemours (baiUiage), 86,142,188, 531, 541 disjunction of booor andincome, 576-77
neo-tithe, 468-69,480 grievances of, 29-35,56-57,59-61,126-30
neologisms, 545 habituated to lawyers, 586
Neuborg (parish), 600 honor, concerns about, 47-50,81,190-198,
Nevera (region of), 223 570, 576-77
news andideal of sacrifice, 86
of insurrections in legislature, 428,435-38 income, concerns about, 80,190-98,577
of legislature in countryside, 272, 491 indemnification, 597-98
Nicolas, Jean, 216n, 250, 264,268, 294, 320, internal egalitarianismamong, 61-62,84-85
324-25,574 lesser nobility in convocation, 85
data on disturbances (1661-1789), 204-5, liberalismof, 33, 508, 572
307,310 mütary identity oL 39,86
night of August 4 (1789), 13,82,427-48, openness to change on the part of, 66, 575
455-57, 487, 490, 513, 523, 535-36, 546, on privilege, 67
550,557 program in caters, 65-144
Index 677
on property, 34,80n, 81-82,197-98, openfieU, 342,396

531-33, 570, 575-76 -as context for revolt, 375, 407,413
public transcript of, 50 description of, 385-86
reform demands of, 124,126-30 opportunities
regionalism of, 137n for peasant action, 359,440, 442, 572,
renunciations of rights in addon, 81 585-86
sees two dusters of seigneurial rights, mutual creation, by peasants and legislatures,
190-96, 576-77 11, 511-12,514, 581
silence in eaters, 56, 63, 79, 201,495, 570 option, right of. Set retrait
status distinctions, bitterness over abolition organization
of, 463-64 and capacity for insunection, 273,310-12,
tax roOs separate for, 83n, 86,170-71,200-1 327, 384-90, 395-96, 580
noncomphanoe as form of resistance, 213-14, of counterrevolution, 321
235,497 created by Revolution, 311-12,327,389, 580
noqjuring dergy as target, 230, 232 innovation in, 321-22,333, 578, 580
Nootka Sound incident, 472-73 See also contexts of insurrection, community
Nord (département.), 95n, 478 organization; chibs, political; elections, rev
Normandy, 9, 95n, 226n, 340-41,344,352, olutionary; National Guards; Sunday; tradi
600, Map 1 tion of contestation
and tmti-gabeUeactions, 348-51 Orléans (.bailliage), 119n, 120,122
nu-pieds of, 424 Orléans, Louis-Philippe-Joseph, duc d’ (legisla
proletarianizationin, 376 tor), 25n.84n.95n. 228n
salt-smugglingin, 349 properties spared violence, 496
seigneurial justice in, 114,116n Ony, Philibert (controler-general), 160
subsistence events in, 351-52 Orwell, George, 531n
Norroy (parish), 120-21 oven, seigneurial monopoly of, 46, 79,110-11,
NcHth(region). 340-41, 344, Map 1 596n. See also monopolies of seigneur
anti-tax actions in, 348, 350,352 Osouf, Mona, 61n
in spring 1789,357
North-Center (region), 340-41,344,409n, Paige. Jeffery, 290-91,392,411
Mapl pamphlets of the pre-revolution, 433n, 435
subsistence events in, 360,420 panics, 298, 302, 344, 378, 407
Northeast (region), 340-41, Map 1 after Great Fear, 414
quiet areas in, 342,367-68 insurrectionary peaks and, 278, 296
landconflicts in, 351 not on Sunday, 319-20
notables. See Third Estate variety of, 259-60
notaries widespread, 260, 287,352
as targets, 506 See also contexts of insurrection; geography
transcribe renunciations, 220 of insunection; Great Fear; insume-
Noyon (region around), 351 tion(s); peaks of conflict; trajectories of
nu-pieds, 265.424 insurrection; waves of insunection
nudeation (of villages), 388 parcours, 172
occupation policy, antifeudalismas, 474 Paris
October Days, 511, 548, 551 dty, 197, 225,391n, 434,445n; of August 10
octrois, 100 (1792), and, 278; role of, 278, 482, 509-
Oisy (region), 226n 11; July 14 (1789), and, 438; and National
Oid Regime Guard, 419,421, 425; popular violence in,
as concept, 169 263n; risings of May 31 andJune 2 (1793),
breakdown of, 288, 412-13 467,482,511
oontestatory traditions under, 320,325-27, region, 340-41, 344, 351n, 391,395, Map 1;
332-35,578 antiseigneurialiam, 357,359; as epicenter.
678 INDEX
368a prone to insurrection, 342; wage agenda incaters, 36-47, 55-64

conflicts in, 351-52 benefit differentially fromlaws, 468-69
Paris-hors-les-murs (bailliage), 78a 81a 130n and burdens, 42-47, 57
Parisot, Jean-Nicolas-Jacques (legislator), 544 diversity of circumstances of, 417-22,426,
Parlaments, 33,287n 563
of Besançon, 448a 550 grievances and Lawof March 15-28,1790,
ofDjjoa 115 462
of Grenoble, 287n historians describe role in Revolutionof,
of Paris, 89,197,598 9-11,14-16, 289-90,338-39,371-74,
of Pan, 287n 582-83
parochialism in cahiers, 137-39 home as target of insunectioa 247
partage. See division of commons ignorance of, 20,243a 435,489-91,496-97,
partition of commons. See division of cannons 542-43, 545-46, 588, 603-6
. pasture/pasturage, 391-92 impact: of legislation oa 489-507,504; im
as locus for lord-peasant conflict, S3, 77, pact on legislation of. 145,146,417-18,
174-75, 252, 481 429a 435, 443-44, 446a 448-50,461a
See also contexts of insurrection, pasture; 463, 466, 475, 481, 487-507. 512, 593
grazing rights; parcours; stock-raising; indemnification paid in practice by, 95a 597
troupeau àpart, vainepâture and lawyers, 107,133a 139,586, 607-9
Patrick, Ahsoa 235 legalese used by, 607
patriots, as targets of insurrection, 259n local orientation of, 137-39
Pau.287 national mentation of, 142-43
Paulson, Ronald, 558n opportunities for mobdizatioa 440,442,572,
payments to lord, 50, 57, 73 512, 581, 585-86
arrears ia 77,125,381 present opportunities for legislative actkn,
demands to reform, 111, 124-25 511-12,514,581
in early revolutionary legislation, 96-98 program incaters, 65-144
indemnification of, 91-92,94,460 proprietors freed from seigneurial rights,
Set also distinguishing among seigneurial 468-69
rights radical demands at, 72-79,94
Pays dilectionslpays dttats, 377 reasoned character of grievances, 20,72, 78,
as context of insurrection, 377-80,396, 399, 117,135, 139, 272, 489-90, 503-4, S74
407,408a 579 seigneurial justice as legitimate ta 115
and Great Fear, 378 seigneurialismas systemic, 139,249, 572,
peaks of conflict, 273-74, 295-302, 494 577-78
anti-tax events, 275-76 variety of grievances of, 36-42
antiseigneurial events, 275,295-96 views differ from: nobles’, 138; Third Es
counterrevohitioa 278 tate’s. 94, 109-10,120,124, 129-30
day by day, 299-302 peasant-bourgeois akance, 513-15,563-69,
July 27 (1789), 301, 436 576-77, 598
landconflicts, 275,278 forging of, 513-15, 583
months and days, 295-96 pedagogy of instructing peasants, 605-6
panics, 278 pensions, 164-65
religious events, 275, 278 People, concept of the, 9
subsistence events, 275-76 Penthièvre. See Bourbon-Penthièvre
wage events, 278 Perche (bailliage), 81-82,84
See also rhythms of insurrection; trajectories Périgord, 9,451
of insurrection antiseigneurial actions ia 228a 418
peasants, 27.63.117-18,138-39, 289-91, croquantsci, A2A
243n early use of insurrectionary maypoles, 224,
act when state defaults, 506-7 324,418
Index 679
Pinguen (baütiagt), 85 Pipes, Richard, 141

periodic dues. See payments to lord PIoérmel (bailliage), 94,125
periphery, signifiance fer Revolutionär 417-22 plots, and night of August 4,429-30
Piróme poaching, 222,498
baütiagt, 119-20 u resistance, 226n
town, 238 Set also forest(s); bunting, seigneurial right
Perpignan (baütiagt), 87 of; pilfering
personification Poitiers (baütiagt), 52,350, 521,571n, 506
in antiseigneurial events, 222,229-30, 249, croquants oí, 424
499, 502, 506, 577 Poitrineau, Abel, 115-16
inanti-tax events, 237-38 polarization among eûtes, 358-59
in parish carters, 53-54,139,249,566,572 politique dupin, 446n
in put centuries, 228-29 Ponían, Krzysztof, 559
inreligious events, 232-33,249,506,577-78 Pünt-à-Mousson (baütiagt), 120-21
in subsistence events, 248-49 Ponthieu (baütiagt), 87n
of seigneuriafism, 139, 572 poor relief, 428
of targets of insurrection, 222,226, 228-30, Foplcin, Jeremy, 493n
232-34, 237-38, 248-49, 499, 502, 506, Foplcin, Samuel, 19n
577-78 population growth andrural conflict, 173-74
Fition de Vüeneuve, Jérime (legislator), 449, portion congrue, 157n
450n, 472 Pothier, Robert, 44, 78n
Phïppe-Egalité. See Orléans, duc d’ poverty, 57n, 373-75, 394-95, 428
physiocracy/physiocrats, 34n, 51,160n, Praslin, comte de (legislator), 562
174-75, 178n, 181,188,196, 200, 241, precedence, as seigneurial right, 47,57. Set
243-44, 481, 485, 565 also symbolization of status
advocate absolute property, 198, 531 predators on crops, 48
cahiers and, 200 prerevolution, 357-58
anddevelopment concerns, 175-77 plebeian aspect of, 265,287n, 335, 575
and intensificationof seigneuriaMsm. 189 prices, 133, 243, 292n, 348n
seigneurial rights criticized by, 181 data on, 371,374
Picardy, 239,351n andinsurrection, 251,338,374-75,411
anti-tax events in, 238 priests, 109,222n
Babeuf in, 2 as deputies to Estates-General, 495n
sah-smugglingki, 348n, 349 blamed for sedition, 486
pigeon-raising, seigneurial right ofj 46, 52, evaluated by notables and vilagers, 109
128-29,599n inbuild-up to counterrevolution, 321
abolitionof, 555 Set also dergy; church; religious events
and agriculture in cahiers, 182 primogeniture, 449
demands to reform, 121-24,126 princes of the blood, 61,85n
grievances about, 38, 55,80,121-24,126 Prion, Pierre, 586
as honorific, 127,191
prist, 53n
indemnification of, 92-93
lucrative aspect of, 191-92 privilege, 163, 428, 478, 555
on night of August 4,163 and seigneurial regañe in cahiers, 169-71
u target of insurrections, 222,226, 502 and taxation, 80,104n, 108
Set also recreational privileges of lords as issue for Third Estate, 35-36,58, 514,
pdfering in woods, 252. Set also forest(s); 570-71
poaching process. See Revolutionas process
PBorget, René, 424n processions, religious, as form of peasant mobi
Pimenova, Ludmila, 33n lisation, 232n, 257n
Pntevfle, Jean-Bapbste de, baron de Centón programs of nobifity, Third Estate andpeasants,
(legislator), 447-48 in cahiers, 65-145
680 INDEX
progress, in thinking of legislators, 199,518 pubfic transcript, 26-27,585

proletarianisation, 351-52, 376 pursuit, right of, 544n
property, 188, 557, 562n, 586,601n, 610 Puy-de-Dflme {département), 546
appropriated by ideological opponents, 189
as defense of rights, 34, 80-84, 86,179, Quéniart, Jean, 307h
197-98, 463, 466, 484n, 531-33, 536-37, Quercy, 461
575-76 and trees of fiberty, 224,324, 418
in debates of light of August 4,457 antiseigneurialismin, 228n, 418
and Declaration of Rights of Manand Citizen, Quesnoy (bailliage), 598
536 Questions deDroit, 610
defined by Civil Code, 555 quiet times for insurrection, 295
and the feudal, 478, 525-27, 533-39, 542, Quimper (baiUiagt), 601n
544, 556, 581-82 Quimperié (region around), 350
as justification for opposed views, 188-89
and honorific rights, 80-84, 86,197-98, 537 Rabaut Saint-Etienne, Jean-Paul (legislator), 546
and Lawof March 15-28 (1790), 461 rabbit-raising, seigneurial right of, 46,48
in legislative debates, 34n, 428, 448-49, abolitionof, 555
476-78, 517, 606 and agriculture incahiers, 182
and liberty, 34 demands to reform, 121-24
in manuals of seigneurial rights, 536 grievances about, 73-76,121-24
in noble discourse, 34, 62n, 82, 86, 531-33, indemnification of, 92-93
570 on night of August 4,163
andreform demands, 124 as target of insurrections, 222,226,502
royal respect for, 549-50 See also recreational privileges of lords
sacred character o£ 34,62n, 80,428,480n, Rabusson-Lamothe, Antoine (legislator), 546
531,542 radicalismincahiers, 67n, 72-79
and sale of royal and church land, 456n Radkey, Oliver, 63-64
property transfer dues. Ser mutation fees Ragan, Bryant, 108n, 239,604n
Ramsay, Clay, 349n, 374n, 413n
Protestant/Catholic conflict, 222n, 232-33,
RapportdeMessieursJ. GodardetL Robin,
331n
441-42, 4611), 603-6
protocitizenship, 143
rational-legal authority, 333
Prouveur, Auguste-Antoine-Joseph(legislator),
reasoned character of peasant demands, 72,78,
478
117, 135,139, 272, 489-90, 503-4, 574
Provence, 1 ,116n, 308n, 309n, 359n, 377n, rebellion. Seeinsurrectioofs)
379, 393, 398, 418-19 recreational privileges of lords, 46,50,52,
comte de, 84n 118-24,187
convocation of Estates-General in, 357-58, demands to reform, 110-11,118-24,126
425 in early revolutionary legislation, 96
distinctive characteristics of antiseigneur grievances about, 38, 45-46, 55-58,73-76,
ialismin, 580 80,110-11,118-24,126
early antiseigneurialismin, 13,228n, 358,424 indemnification of, 91
elite struggles in, 61n, 425 on night of August 4,163
National Guards vs. early counterrevolution as target of insurrections, 222,226,227n,
in. 421 498,502
seventeenth-century urbanrevolts m, 424n See also arms, right to bean fishmg/fishponds,
in spring 1789,409n seigneurial right of; hunting, seigneurial
village solidarity in, 385, 387-88 right of; pigeon-raising, seigneurial right of;
Provincial Estates, 128,377 rabbit-raising, seigneurial right of
province as arena of concern in cahiers, 137n Reddy, William, 376n
provisioning policy of new regime, 291 redistribution of land. See agrarianhnr
Prussia, 591,593 reform 70-71,98-130
Index 681
not characteristic of grievances about sei repression of disturbances as policy option, 428,
gneurial regime, 70,572 431n, 438-43, 447-51, 456n, 485n, 491,
customary lawand, 126 508-11, 543, 606, 610
andequity, 103-10 advocated by Merlin, 447
andjudicial remedies, 129-30 republicanism, 200, 547, 594n
nobles’ distinctive style of, 126-29 rescue, as form of collective action, 261
taxation and, 71.96-109,133-36,141-42, resistance: to Revolution, 344n; without open
572-73 challenge, 602. Seealso evasion
Third Estate’s distinctive style of, 129-30, responsibility
573 of lord. Seeduties of lord
variety of proposals, 129-30 of ministers, 29
refractory dergy. See nonjuring dergy Restif de la Bretonne, Nicolas-Edmé, 115, 586
regionalism, 137n restoration: of communal rights, 252n; of sei
regions, 339-42, Map 1 gneurial rights, 444n, 477, 593
problems of classification, 339-41 retardation of France as element in thmkxig of
registration taxes, 100,104,107-8,159. Set legislators, 518
also General Farms/General Farmers; taxa retrait, 77
tion, indirect demands to reform, 125
Reinhard, Marcel, 3 in early revolutionary legislation, 97
religion and seigneurial regime, 47,154-57, and expansion of lord’s holdings, 381
199-200. Steals* casueb; durch; dergy; indemnification of, 93
religious events; tithe as market hindrance, 187
religious events, 218, 254,296, 344 opposed by physiocrats, 175-76
antifeudal aspects oí, 219n, 229-30 Réveillon disturbance, 445n
documents as target, 229-30 revolution as process, 8,13,17, 42, 57-58,
insurrectionary peaks, 275,278 266-69, 369-70, 411,426, 489, 567, 585
monastery as target, 229 beyond 1789, 396-406
mpays ditats, 379 changing: complexity of events, 322-24; con
Protestant-Catholic conflict, 331 texts of revolt, 399; meanings of feudalism,
on Sundays, 320 169,199, 201; patterns of insurrection,
tithe as target, 229-30 204, 288-89; changing peasant positions,
variety of, 229-33 366-67,462; changingweekly insurrec
and violence against persons, 232-33,249, tionarycycle, 310-22
506,577-78 concept of, 8,13,17,581
Set also contexts oí insurrection; geography interactive character of conflict, 586-87
of insurrection; insurrectionfs); peaks of limits of long-run explanations, 266-67
conflict; trajectories of insurrection; waves poses methodological problems, 369-70
of insurrection new forms of contestation, 313
remedies in law, promoted by Third Estate, opinion influx, 136
129-30,573 source of shocks, 312
Renaukfon, Joseph, 47n, 49, 79n, llOn, 141n the turnto antiseigneurialiam, 333,513-15,
on duties of lord, 140-41 C £A
U w
on honorific rights, 156 revolution, theories of, 338-39,409-12

Rennes (bailliage), 121,601n revolutions, 4, 274n, 338-39
rentesfoncières, 60, 62 of 1848, 255, 332, 591, 593
renunciation of seigneurial rights of 1830s, 591,593
in cahiers, 81, 83 American, 6-7,472-73
coerced by collective action, 1,4, 220, 499 Angolan, 411
on night of August 4, 428,444n, 446n Chinese, 412
replacement of institution, demands for, 71 English, 383, 560,589
representation, 437n Mexican, 412
682 INDEX
Peruvian, 411 Rose, R. B„ 485n

Russian, 7, 64.137n, 141. 383, 412.423 Rosenthal, Jean-Laurent, 173
Vietnamese, 411 Rouen
Rhineland bailliage, 102n, 121
complainingprinces of,470-72 region around, 376
French arases in, 478n Rouergue, 262n, 421,461
Rhfine valley. 249,395 earty use of maypole in, 418
rhythms of insurrection, 302-36 Roure’s revolt, 229n
annual cycle, 324-32 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 225,478, 570n, 586
and everyday life, 302-3,327 royalism, 553. See also king; Louis XVI; mon
revolutionary changes in, 310-22 archy
weekly cyde, 307-22 Roye (region around), 351
Richet, Denis, 33. 570 rapture, Revolution as, 4, 200, 323, 509,518,
right 520-21, 543, 554-56,558-60, 582,606
of option. Ses retrait conception oh 555
in National Assembly, 444-46, 542n andjustification for contmuity, 535
rights, seigneuriaL See anna, right to bear; aveu sacred and secular ideas oh 521,559-60
et dinombrtment, ban defauchaison; ban de raralAirbandivisions, 238-39
moisson; ban de vendangr, bottom; cens; Rustaing (bailliage), 104n, 106n, 160n
dumpart; coats-of-arms; conies (seigneur*
ial); churchbenches; dogs; fairs and mar Sabatier, Gérard, 229n
kets, seigneurial rights over; fishing/fiah- sacking residence, as form of collective action,
ponds, seigneurial right to; fid et hommage; 261
hogging, seigneurial right; honorific rights; sacrifice, nobles’ idea! oh 81,447-48
hunting, seigneurial right of; justice, sei Sagnac, PUippe, 466n, 538n
gneurial; lods et ventes; milling, seigneurial St André-sur-Caüly (parish), 121
monopoly of; monopolies of seigneur, muta Samt-Bartholomew’s Massacre of property,
tion fees; oven, seigneurial monopoly oh 440n
payments to lord; pigeon-raising, seigneur Saint-Cloud-en-Beauce (parish), 121
ial right oh precedence, as seigneurial Saint-Dems-Les-Fonts (parish), 122
right; rabbit-raising, seigneurial right oh St H3aire-de-Brens (village), 294
recreational privileges; symbolization of Saintfecob, Piene de, 77, 79, 82n, 83,381n
status; thighing, seigneurial right; tola, sei communal self-defense, 172-73
gneurial; weathervanes; winepress, sei on physiocrats, 189
gneurial monopoly of St Jam d’Angély (region around), 50n
Riley, femes, 35n, 103n, 104n, 141-42 Saint Mihiel (bailliage), 540-41
Rivard, Antoine, 440n St Pierre-le-Moutier (bailliage), 165n
roads and insurrection, 375, 380-81,396 St Quentin (bailliage), 350-51
Robespierre, Maximihen-Marie-Isidore.(legisla Saintes (bailliage), 86n, 189, 531
tor), 450, 490n, 610 Saintonge, croquants oh 424
on Natioaal Guards, 420n saisie, 53n
on royal obstruction of dismantling feudal re salience of seigneurial regime, defined, 148
gime, 552 Salomon de la Saugerie, Guillaume-Anne (legis
on war, 474 lator), 456
Robin, Léonard, 9, 27,441-42,461n, 469,491, salt-smuggling, and insurrection. 240, 348-51.
543,545-46,603-6 Sw also gabelle
on villagers’ use of legalese, 607 sampling
Robin, Régine. 143n, 189, 531,536,539-40 oí cahiers, 22, 28-29,146n, 366, 541n
Roger, Philippe, 545 of insurrections, 211-18, 236-37,409n
Romorantin (bailliage), 107,109-10 Sariat (région oO. 116, 223,224n, 266n
Root, Hiton, 10, 567, 607 Sarrebourg et Phalsbourg (bailliagt), 108
Index 683
Sarrekxm (bailliage), 223a coerced vs. contractual, 132,460,534-37

Sartfae (département), 115,168n, 346 andcommerce, 178-81
Saufac-Tavanes, due de, 118o and communal rights, 171-75
Saumir confounded with tithe, 157
bailliage, 433,435 conceptual mapof, 145-202; unity of,
region, 346 148-54,190-96
Savoy, 76,260,591 defended by nobility, 85
as antifeudal precedent for French legisla demands: for equity, 104,109; to maintain,
tion. 534 72-79
Savoyards and Great Fear, 260 documents to be burned by law, 468
Saxe-Weimar, 592 extreme character of demands about, 71-72
Saxony, 473n, 591 and feudal rights, 517-18
acales, as target of insurrections, 222 andfinance, 178-81
scarcity. Set hunger and insurrection andhonor, 118,193
Schama, Simon, 225—26,249n andmdu8try, 178-81
Scott, James C., 19n, 291,411-12,531n and king’s relationship to legislature, 547
ondomination, 26-27 legislation on, 451-69
on furtive resistance, 213 legitimate and illegitimate, 458,466
on moral economy, 567 legitimized by service, 110-11
on strategic speech, 601 linked to: careers, 200-202; economic devel
Scott, Samuel, 439n opment, 202; privilege, 202
seasonality and monarchical consitution, 87
of insurrection, 326,329-32 noble: conceptions of, 190-98; sflence on,
revolutionary conflict feed from, 334 570
of social truce, 326 of king, 162
secrecy of mads, 29 on night of August 4,163
Sée, Henri, 18n, 415n prerevolutionary everyday resistance to, 214
Ségur law, 166-67 andproperty, 179,188, 531-33
seigneur. 4,42,42,77,120, 528 real vs. personal, 536
ecclesiastical entities as, 146n, 158,161 and reform proposals, 98-99,109-30,133,
and local religious practice, 155-56 573
and noble as conflated social categories, 600 andreligion. 199-200,202
redefined as proprietor, 535-36 and services, 12,132
as target of insurrection, 16,222, 251,483, as system, 139, 574
499, 502, 506, 577 and taxation, 157-62
as usurper, 172-75, 251 Hce a tree, 467-68.
See also antiseigneurial events; seigneurial See also agents of seigneur, distinguishing
regime among rights; honorific rights; specific sei
seigneurial gneurial rights
dues. See payments to lord Seine valley, 116n
Semur-en-Auxois (bailliage), 143n
reaction, 54, 77, 189,381n, 528
Sens
seigneurial regime, 1-2,18, 73,161,177-78,
bailliage, 126
194-96,200-202, 335,470, 509-54 district, 334
arbitrariness in revolutionary classification of, serfdom, 9, 51-52,431n. 434-35, 561-63
537-38 as barbaric, 160
arrears on dues, 125 criticism of, 76-78,199-200
as barbarism, 87, 458n defense of, 77-78
and agriculture, 176-78,182-83 demands for indemnification, 91
as burden, 57,154-62 grievances about, 76,91
in cahiers of 1614,134 Louis XVI abolishes on bis domain, 76,439,
and church exactions, 154-57 549-50
684 INDEX
as lucrative right, 191 literacy data, 383n

andmonastic lords, 200 olive and almond production, 388n
on night of August 4,163 open&eld, 386n, 388n
revolutionary legislation on, 78,97-96,461 price data, 374n
Savoy emancipates, 591 roads, 380n
\Wtaire on, 76,199-200 settlement densities, 388n
See also mainmorte; pursuit, right of time for news of insurrections to reach depu
services, 135, 480n, 572-73,606 ties, 437n
and burdens, 135 weak on history of Lawof August 25 (1792),
demanded of seigneur, 120 466
and seigneurial rights, 12,18, 83,110-11, See also methodology, issues of
120, 132-33,139-40,164-65, 379-80 South-Center (region), 340-41, 344,389, Map
andtaxation, 102-3 1
settlement patterns, 388-89 activism«, 360
severing sacred tie as form of collective action, durability of peasant mobüzation, 398
261 trajectory of revolt, 425
SeweO, WflBam, 263n, 332 Southeast (region) 13, 340-41,344, Map 1
innovation in organization of collective action, active. 13, 342, 360-61, 475
321,334 antiseigneuriaKsmin, 357
Shapiro, Gilbert, 5 ,596n counterrevolution in, 348,418
sharecroppers, 9, 311n, 342,468-69,479n, in spring 1789,357
483, 487, 490, 582 in winter 1790, 511
Siegfried, André, 384 Southwest (region), 13,340-41,344,451, 491,
Sieyès, Emmanuel-Joseph (legislator), 433, 445 Mapl
Singer, Brian, 226,263n antiseigneurial events in, 352,360, 580
Skocpol, Theda, 384,412 continuing disturbances in, 398,468-69,
slavery, 160n, 428,431n, 571n 545-46,562
Smith, Adam, 34n, 559 denial of validity of law, 602
smuggling. See salt-smuggling; tobacco rent as synonym for feudal rights, 469
Soboul, Albert, 10, 28n, 279n trajectory of revolt, 425
and Marxist conceptions, 3 Dees of Liberty in, 333
debated by Cobban, 598 sovereignty, 471, 519, 522,536, 547.551, 555,
on the Enlightenment, 570n 557,571
explaining bourgeois-peasant alliance, 564-65 Spain, 470,472-73
on geography of revolt, 339,424 speech as strategic, 26-27,135,139, 585-86,
on peasant actions, 583 600-606
on transition from feudalism to capitalism, 180 Spire, bishop of, 470-71
social movements, 359, 422-23, 584-86 Staël, Anne-Louise-Germaine de, 446n
sociology, 559-60, 582 sute growth, 4,33-35,133,198, 262-63,267,
Somme (département), 108n 359, 376-77, 385, 396, 502, 522, 565-68,
Somme \fcfley, 514 570
Soule (bailliage), 130,223n, 600 as cause of Revolution, 14-15,410
sources accepted by peasants, 99,107-8,574
administrative centralization, 377n as arbiter, 502
cahiers, 5-6, 20-22 blamed for scarcity, 243-44,411
cereal yields, 394n as context of revolt, 399,407-8» 411, 579
city size, 380n exactions oL 16, 42
Great Fear, 208 provider of services, 133
insurrections, 7-8,207-9,216,613-19 and reappropriation of antiseigneurial actions,
land use variables, 392n 507-8, 602-3
on legislators, 3,8,204,609n resisted by communities, 16,99
Index 685
and subsistence disturbances, 411 and state growth, 411

See also narratives of Revolution, Tbcquevü- trajectory of, 294
lean; TocquevflJe variety of, 242-49
Stinchcombe, Arthur, 324n, 384, 386-87 on vast scale, 313
stock-raising, 252, 375, 391. See also contexts violence in, 246,248-49
of insurrection; parcours:, pasture/pastur- visits to home of wdl-ofi, 246-47
age; troupeau àpart, vamepâture womenin, 247
Stone, Lawrence, 383 wrongdoer as target, 246
subject (of a grievance), 23-25 See afro Flour War
subsistence events, 4, 218, 226n, 244-46, 290, Sunday
344, 376, 378, 396* 407, 420, 499, 546 changes in insurrectionary practice, 308
in Brittany, 355 as day of riot, 308-10,332,334
andcaters, 354n andfestivals, 309n
changing: forms of action, 247-48, 294; sa and forms of insurrection, 313-22
lience. 287,294 andpanics, 319-20
château as target, 246-47 profane aspects of, 309
andcities nearby, 381 regional variations in insurrectionary role of,
convoys as target, 243-44 389-90
and division within peasant communities, revolutionary effacement of, 335n
319,352 role in riot weakened, 312-14
dominate at onset of Revolution, 268 survivals et seigneurial rights, 557, 594n
England and Germany compared to France, Sutherland. Donald, 114,116,168n, 237n, 294,
242n 367n
in European context, 242-43 on benefits of Revolution, 590n
geographic aspects of, 351 on lord-church nexus, 155-56
granary as target, 246 on counterrevolution, 256, 336,346, 415n
great frequency of, 268,287 on peasant role in Revolution, 289
hoarding and, 243 suzerain, 44,60
hunger and, 243-44,246 sword as status marker, 48,126,167
in insurrectionary peaks, 275, 278,295-96 symbolization of status, 47-49, 79,83,96,123,
on market days, 314, 319 197,571
marketplace as locale for, 244—46 abolished, 462-64, 585
in Normandy, 352 defense of, 530-31
inNorth-Center, 360-61 grievances about, 48,56,78
in November 1792, 296,450 material significance of, 82n
at onset of Revolution, 579 as target of insurrection, 57-58,223
andopenfield, 387 variety of, 126-27
organization of, 321-22 See afro arms, right to bear; château as target
peasant home as target, 247 of insurrection; church benches; coats-of-
personification in, 248-49 anns; gallows; honor; honorific rights;
place among insurrections, 577 hunting, seigneurial right of; Lawoh June
andprices, 374 19 (1790); lord-church nexus, precedence;
price-setting, coerced, 246 turrets as targets of insurrection; weather-
producers as targets in, 246-47 vanes
resemble antiseigneurial events, 248
as resistance against state authority, 378,411 Ihckett, Timothy, 124n, 225,355n, 460
androads, 375 on composition of National Assembly, 509
role of army in, 29In on impact of violence on legislators, 417n
as seedbed of other forms of conflict, 287-88, on National Assembly's Right, 444
291-92,413-14 on residence of noble delegates, 138
in 1788,355 on West, 422
686 INDEX
taille, 37, 80,105-6,239-40,600 critique of structural accounts of Revolution,

grievances about, 37,100-101 567,569n
riele, 106 lack of peasant radicalism, 67,69-70, 513U,
reform efforts, 103,106 583
tardée, 106 on eaten, 19-20
seigneuriale, 53n on peasant role in Revolution, 289
Tbieyrand-Périgord, Chartes-Maurice de (legis on processual aspects of Revolution, 569n
lator), 545 TeiBy-le-Feneux (parish), 122
Tarbes, 308n tenancy, regional variations in, 342
Tard-avisís, 424 textles, in northern France, 376
'Target, Guy-jean-Bapdste (legislator), 428, Thatcher, Margaret, as historian, 589
438n.441 Théorie des matièresféodales et censadles, 59
Ihrrow, Sidney, 213,322,423-24 theorists of economy, and seigneurial regime,
taxation, 12. 29, 99,100,103, 234,475 179. Seeate physiocrats
administration ci, 4,102,105-6, 237-40 Thermidor, 610
in cahiers ci 1614,134 TNbaudeau, Antoine-Claire (legislator), 524n,
andcitizenship, 135,142 556o,429
demands: for equity, 104-5,lOSn; to reform, Hribaudeau, Antoine-René-Hyacinthe (legisla
71, 98-109,133,134n, 573 tor), 429
detested, 141-42 “thighing,” seigneurial right, 49
direct, 80.100-107,105,134n. 239-40 Thionville (bailliage), 121
farming, 103 Third Estate, 13, 27-28, 35-36, 596
grievances: about, 12, 29, 36-38, 40-41,71, agenda in caters, 35-37, 39,50-64
98-99,100-9,133-35,157-63,239, 573; antiseigneurialiamof, 201
and anti-tax actions, 236,239 characteristic grievances of, 58,62-64,
from impositions to contributions, 142 70-72,570-71
indirect, 100-4, 108n, 134n, 135,239-40, and free markets, 35-36, 50-53, 58,62-63,
292n 171-90, 201, 514, 570-71, 596
inefficacy, 102 demands legal remedies, 120,129-30,573
legislative concern to protect, 449,456 differences withpeasants on nrifimfirahnn,
and night of August 4,457 94
and private profit, 102 fears of armed population, 113
privileges, 37,108,163,198,457 feudal regañe, conceived incaters, 162-69,
and provision of services, 100,102-3 518
reform attempts of Old Regime, 103,106,471 and indemnification, 88,94-96,201,574,
rural resistance to, 423-26 597-98,600
and seigneurial regime in cahiers, 157-62 institutions associated with seigneurial rights,
separate rolls for nobility, 83n, 86,170-71, 145-90, 576-77
200-201 on night of August 4, 428
under Revolution, 234-36,349,449,456,578 on privilege, 35-36,58,169-71,568, 570-71
See also aides; anti-tax events; anti-tax re profile of deputies of, 509
volts of seventeenth century; capitation; programin cahiers, 65-144
droit de centième denier, droit de contróle; radical demands of, 69n, 72-79
droits <fentrée et desortie; droit ¿insinua as seigneurs, 124,130, 596-97, 600
tion; droits de marque, droits domamur, on tithe, 109-10
franc-fief, gabelle; General Farms/General views differ from peasants*, 94,109-10,
Farmers; octrois; taâlr, truites; vingtièmes 120,124
Taylor, George, 10, 72,136,142,180 Tilly, Charles, 263-64,322n, 346,366, 374n,
on absence of constitutional issues in parish 510n
caten, 40 on history of affective political action, 99,
as dissenter, 589 255-56,332,335
Index 687
on long-run processes, 267 narratives of Revolution: Ibcquevflean ac

on mobilization for counterrevolution, 336 count; Tocqueville, Alexis de
on mral/urban divide, 238n Ibdd, Emmanuel, 142
Tffly, Louise, 244a 247n, 375 toüs, seigneurial, 117-18, 599n
availability of food and food riots, 396 abolitionof, 555
tithe, 154,222 indemnificatioq 93
and night of August 4,163,429a 444-45 grievances about, 36, 58, 73,82,522
and public service, 109, 480n opposed by physiocrats, 175-76
and seigneurial rights in cahiers, 163 in early revolutionary legislation, 97-96
as target erfinsurrection, 229-30,409n Tbrrtbens, 424
in cahiers of 1614,134-35 Tbul (bailliage), 571n
clerical objections to revolutionary legislation Toulouse
about, 444-45 bailliage, 156n
confounded with seigneurial rights, 157,219, region around, 79,83h, 115,118n
230,479-80 town duties, 100
ecclesiastical vs. infeudated, 479-80 towns, as contexts of revolt, 413
grievances about, 38,104,109-10 traditionof contestatkm, 307,320,322,332-35,
legislation on, 445, 451,479-80 413,423-24
peasants distinguish casuels from, 109-10 anti-tax rebellion ia 12, 42, 235, 239, 424
demands to reform, 109 continuities in Revohitioa 255-56,578
windfall of abolition to proprietors, 480 forms of contestatkm, 264-66
See also casuels; champart, church; dergy; quantitative data on, 325-26
dime mfiodet. Lawof: April 14-20 (1790); subsistence conflicts in Normandy, 376n
Lawof: December 1-12 (1790); neo-tithe; violence ia 228-229
night of August 4; tithe-holders traites, demands for reform, 100-101,107-8
tithe-holders, 109,157-58 trajectories of insurrection
tithe, infeudated. See dbne inféodeé antiseigneurial events, 275,287-89
titles, seigneurial, 334,499,602. See oho docu anti-tax events, 278, 292
ments as target of insurrection changing character of, 290
tobacco, smuggling of, 349 common elements o£ 275
Tocqueville, Alexis de, 4 ,19a 67.388,396,399 counterrevolutkm, 278, 292-93
on burdens, 10 distinguishing forms of action ia 274-88
on continuity, 323 land conflicts, 294
on delegitimation oí local lords, 133a methodological matten, 270-71
139-40,379-80 panics, 278
on democracy, 80, 85 peaks, 273-74
duties of lord, 4,18-19,33 religious events, 275
explanation of Revolution, 14-15 salience defined, 279
on fairness, 20 saw-tooth pattem, 271-74
subsistence conflicts, 287-88, 294
geological theory, 410
on historic task of Revolution, 552 thetumtoantiseigneurialismia 288-89,
291,569
on inevitability of Revolution, 567n wage conflicts, 278, 292-94
on liberalism of nobility, 66-67 See also anti-tax events; antiseigneurial
on nobility, 66-67, 80-81, 82a 85, 440n events; contexts of insurrection; counter
on noble cahiers, 81,82n revolution; geography of insurrection; in-
on outworn privilege, 199-200 surrection(s); land conflicts; panics; peaks
on parishcahiers, 138-39 of conflict; religious events; subsistence
on state, 33-35,133a 198,376-77 events; wage events; waves of insurrection
See also narratives of Revolution: Tocquevil- transport of graia a* locus of conflict, 243-44
lean account; Tocqueväban tradition treaties
TocqueviUean tradition, 267, 359, 385. See also of princes, and peoples, 471-72,479n
688 INDEX
on seigneurial rigbts. See manualsof seigneur Versafcs, 511

ial rights veto, royal, 3,551
tree as metaphor for feudal regime, 468,544 WzeMse (baiUiage), 121
trees of liberty, 27, 57,324,578, 580 Vic (baiUiage), 122
ambiguity of, 224-25 viHage sett-government, 387-88
authorities frightened by, 442 Vfflard, Pierre, 116
Grégoire writes on, 418-19 VBers-Cotterets (.baiUiage), 86
regional origins of, 418-19 ViBers-la-Motitagne (baiUiage), 87
inSouthwest, 333 vm&iimes, 37
trees of lord, as target of insurrections, 220,226 grievances about, 80n, 100
Itëguier (city), 346 and tax reform attempts, 103,106
DräumduPeople, 610 violence, 225-26,434,442n. 589
Ihmchet, François-Denis (legislator), 455, in antiseigneurial events, 222,225, 226n,
462,459n 229, 249, 499, 506
troupeau àpart, 172,391 as basis for seigneurial rights, 446n, 477, 571
Hoyes (baiUiage), 112-13,600 and biases in data, 217
grievances in cahiers ai 1614,134, 266 of ex-lords against peasants, 442
Hoyes (city), as initiator of National Guard, 419 impact on legislators, 456
truce in rural conflicts, 325 in past centuries, 228-29
HiDe (region of), 227n in Paris, 225, 417
turrets as target of insurrection, 48, 57-58, against persons, 222, 225, 226n, 229,
223, 507. See also symbolization of status 232-33, 248-49, 499, 502, 506, 525,577
in religious events, 249, 390n, 506
unemployed, in debate on disorders, 441 in subsistence events, 246,248-49
uprisings. See insurrection(s) unnecessary to progress, 589
urbanpresence, 380-81 up in faD1792, 505-6
Uriu, Yoichi, 382n Virgin, miracle-working image of, 233, 257n
usurpation Virieu, François-Henri, comte de (legislator),
of land by lord, 220, 251-52,254-55, 444
481-82, 498, 538 viticulture, 375,392-93,407
of noble prerogatives by monarchy, 523-24 Vhry-le-françois (baiUiage), 87n, 571n
as origin of seigneurial rights, 52n, Hin, Vivarais, 229n
446n, 455n, 460-61, 470, 474, 477, 521, Valney, Constantin-François Chassebeufde
534, 536, 538, 548n, 571, 578 (legislator), 493n
Uierche (region around), 227n Vahaire (François-Marie Arouet), 562n, 570n
critique of lord-church nexus, 199-200
vagabonds, in debate on disorders, 441 on serfdom, 76
wanepâture, 172 voting rules of Estate-General, 29,67, 170
vandalism, 524 voting inrevolutionary elections. See elections,
coined by Grégoire, 544n revolutionary
Vannes (region around), 83n, 115 Vovefle, Michel, 257,360n. 367, 393,489n
Vhrdy, Lianna, 492n on counterrevolution and antiseigneuriaism.
Viennes, flight to, 249, 553 346
diffusion of news about, 272n, 436 on Mediterranean vMage communities, 387
vassal, 44,44n on regionalization, 340
in eighteenth century, 59-60 on rural resistance to Revolution, 344n
Vauduse (département), 421 on subsistence events, 413-14
Vellaux (parish), 601n as IbcqueviDean, 385n
venality of office, 163-65 on western peasant solidarity, 407n
and Law of August 4-11 (1789), 555
Vendée (département), 350n wage events, 5,219, 296,344,407, 467
Vfcri, Joseph Alphonse de, 549n andassignats. 292n
Index 689
concentrated in Paris region, 3S2 299, 331, 464-65, 474-76, 487, 497,
distinctive contexts of, 413 504-5
anddivisions withinpeasant communities, 319 late summer (August-September 1792),
geographic aspects of, 351 294-95, 350, 465, 467, 487, 506n
growing numbers of, 250n late autumn (November-December 1792),
insurrectionary peaks, 278 245n, 296, 313, 360, 450, 497
under Old Regime, 250 March 1793, 292, 294, 296,301-2,321,331,
organization of, 294n, 321-22 365n, 450, 485, 488, 497
andSunday, 314 See also geography of insurrections; peaks of
trajectory, 292-94 conflict; trajectories of insurrection
undercounted, 219 weapons. See arms, right to bear
variety of, 250 weathervanes
See also contexts of insurrection,' geography as status markers, 47,127
of insurrection; msurrectionfs); peaks of as targets of insurrection, 57-58,223, 507,
conflict; trajectories of insurrection; waves 604-5
of insurrection See also symbolization of status
wage-laborers, 8, 487. See also wage conflicts weavers, 9
war. 3. 258, 327, 449, 469-79, 510, 538 Weber, Eugen, 142,144, 241,492
Anglo-Spanish, danger of, 472-73 Weber, Max, 333
and antiseigneurialiam, 475,488, 512, 557, weights andmeasures, grievances about, 36
581 Wehman, Sasha, 33n, 377, 565
constitutional issues over, 472-73 West (region), 340-41,342-43,389.396, Map
Couthon on, 474-75 1
declaration of, 477 anti-tax events in, 350
and insurrection, 293 antiseigneurial events in, 346, 352,415
and labor shortages, 294n counterrevolution in, 344-46,352,360-61,
for moral principles, 473 365,415
and resistance to Revolution, 258 distinctive insurrectionary trajectories of,
of revolutionary state, 258 361-67,415
as struggle against feudalism, 470-71, early antiseigneuriaMsmand later counterrev
473-74, 477-79 olution in, 415
See also conscription grievances in caters of, 366-67
war against the ponds, 227n. See also fishing/ precocious politicization of, 355, 357
fishponds, seigneurial right to refusal of clerical oath in, 321
wars of religion, 222n, 233 religious events in, 363
Warsaw, Grand Duchy of, 592 See also Brittany; counterrevolution
wasteland, 375,407 Westphalia, Kingdomof, 593
Water and Forest Administration, 252n Whitman, James, 532n
waves of insurrection, 503, 508-9, 538, 578-79 wine-production. See viticulture
spring (March-May 1789), 42, 296-97, winepress, seigneurial monoployo( 160
357-58, 495 Wolf, Eric, 394
summer (July-August 1789), 13, 58, 203-4, women in elections and colective actions, 21n,
260, 278, 295-96, 298-99, 301-2, 327, 211,247
331-32, 359-60, 436, 448, 466, 487, 495 words, power of, 14, 434,439, 544-47
winter (December 1789-February 1790), 58, Württemberg, 591
296, 299, 448-49,461,487,497,511, 545, duke of, 470-71
553,580
June 1790, 462,487,497 yields of cereal crops, 375, 407, 413
June 1791, 331, 442n, 497, 542 Übung, Arthur, 386n, 442-43
winter-spring (February-April 1792), 278, youth groups, and conflict, 307-8, 310

John Markoff - The Abolition of Feudalism - Peasants, Lords, and Legislators in The French Revolution-Penn State University Press (1997) PDF

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THE

T he P ennsylvania S tate U n iversity P ress

Library o f Congress Catak)ging-in-Publication Data

Markoff, John, 1942-

Copyright © 1996 The Pennsylvania State University

List o f Figures and Maps ix

1. Introduction: Grievances, Insurrections, Legislation 1

2. Seigneurial Rights on the Revolutionary Agenda 16

3. Three Revolutionary Programs 65

4. On the Ideological Construction o f the Seigneurial Regime by

5. Forms o f Revolt: The French Countryside, 1788-1793 203

6. Rhythms o f Contention 271

7. H acking Insurrection through Tim e and Space 337

8. Revolutionary Peasants and Revolutionary Legislators 428

9. Words and Things: The French Revolutionary Bourgeoisie

10. Conclusion: From Grievances to Revolution 561

Appendix: Sources for Peasant Insurrection Data 613

Fig. 6.1 Insurrectionary Events by Month 271

Map 7.1 Regions, Provinces, and Select Towns 341

Table 2.1 Subjects M ost Widely D iscussed in Cahiers, Ranked

3 .9 Tax Equity Concerns in Parish Cahiers: Reform

4.13 D ifferences in Discussions o f Seigneurial Regime in

5.4 TVpes o f Anti-tax Events 234

8.2 Events with Antiseigneurial A spect over Tim e (% ) 494

André Fel, Bernard Sinsheimer, Donald Sutherland, Bryant Ragan, Steven

In the 1780s young m en seeking employment under Alpine lords used to

1. Jean Nicolas, "Le paysan et son seigneur en Dauphiné à la veüe de la Révolution,” in

4. Marcel Reinhard, “Sur l’histoire de h Révolution française,” Amales: Economies, Sociétés,

8. Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, “Révoltes et contestations rurales en France de 1675 à 1788,"

imminent invasions by criminals or foreign armies or aristocrats’ lackeys.

11. Gflbert Shapiro andJohn Markoff, RevolutionaryDemands: A ContentAnalysis ofthe Cahiers

spring, Frenchmen m et in tens o f thousands o f assem blies to draw up

(“ British North America” versus “ the colonies in Am erica," say).12 M arc

(and o f different objects at that). The concept o f process, s o central to

demanding lords who w ere them selves increasingly inclined to participate in

18. Tocqueville, OldRegimeandRevolution.

econom ic relationships and toward placing revolutionary discourse at the

1. Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, “Révoltes et contestations rurales en Prance de 1675 à 1788,“

through an exploration o f the rural grievances expressed at the Revolution’s

fathers had supported.”6 But he returns quickly to the them e o f a seigneurial

6. Lefebvre, Paysans duNord, 149.

perspective Tocqueville suggests w e note how , heavy as the dem ands o f

11. Ibid.. 22-31.

The Cahiers de Doléances

M ajesty’s subjects, through their representatives, conveyed their view s to

Coding the Cahiers

We shall illustrate the hierarchical principle by show ing those sections o f

G 0 Governm ent— M iscellaneous

“ Taxation” is divided into L evel 3 categories as follow s:

G TA 0 Governm ent— Taxation— M iscellaneous

Finally, G TA IN , “ Indirect T axes,” is divided into the follow ing relatively

G TA IN 0 Existing Indirect Taxes— M iscellaneous

G TA IN DF D roits sur la Fabrication

A s w e shall see, the main advantage o f this kind o f hierarchical organiza­

We need to see the assem blies that adopted d ie cahiers as engaged in a

The Rural World of Burdens

Ih x on alcoholic beverages (aides)

pared o f this aristocratic sensitivity to Varbitraire.x In this concern with

wtih the Tocquevillean expectation that it would be particularly com m on

w as m ade m ore burdensom e still in those parts o f the kingdom in which a

M l e 2 .2 . G rievances Concerning Burdens (% )

Type o f Burden Parishes Third Estate Nobility

Taxation 32% 16% 15%

A s w e shall see, the main advantage o f this kind o f hierarchical organiza

The invocation o f property as an argument against uncom pensated aboli

rights)63 lies in his attem pt to present their distinctive advocacy o f indemni