Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
- Introduction
- Voices from Among the “Silent Masses”: Humble Petitions and Social Conflicts in Early Modern Central Europe
- Supplications between Politics and Justice: The Northern and Central Italian States in the Early Modern Age
- The Power of Petitions: Women and the New Hampshire Provincial Government, 1695–1700
- Officially Solicited Petitions: The Cahiers de Doléances as a Historical Source
- Revolt, Testimony, Petition: Artisanal Protests in Colonial Andhra
- Deference and Defiance: The Changing Nature of Petitioning in British Naval Dockyards
- Petitions and the Social Context of Political Mobilization in the Revolution of 1848/49: A Microhistorical Actor-Centered Network Analysis
- The Image of Jews in Byelorussia: Petitions as a Source for Popular Consciousness in the Early Twentieth Century
- “Begging the Sages of the Party-State”: Citizenship and Government in Transition in Nationalist China, 1927–1937
- Private Matters: Family and Race and the Post-World-War-II Translation of “American”
Officially Solicited Petitions: The Cahiers de Doléances as a Historical Source
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 August 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
- Introduction
- Voices from Among the “Silent Masses”: Humble Petitions and Social Conflicts in Early Modern Central Europe
- Supplications between Politics and Justice: The Northern and Central Italian States in the Early Modern Age
- The Power of Petitions: Women and the New Hampshire Provincial Government, 1695–1700
- Officially Solicited Petitions: The Cahiers de Doléances as a Historical Source
- Revolt, Testimony, Petition: Artisanal Protests in Colonial Andhra
- Deference and Defiance: The Changing Nature of Petitioning in British Naval Dockyards
- Petitions and the Social Context of Political Mobilization in the Revolution of 1848/49: A Microhistorical Actor-Centered Network Analysis
- The Image of Jews in Byelorussia: Petitions as a Source for Popular Consciousness in the Early Twentieth Century
- “Begging the Sages of the Party-State”: Citizenship and Government in Transition in Nationalist China, 1927–1937
- Private Matters: Family and Race and the Post-World-War-II Translation of “American”
Summary
INTRODUCTION: THE CAHIERS DE DOLÉANCES
The cahiers de doléances of 1789 have generally been regarded as unique historical documents. In convening the Estates General, the royal government followed centuries-old precedent in asking the nation not only to elect representatives to an assembly, but to provide them with lists of the demands, wishes, and grievances of their constituents as well. One could hardly describe these documents as resources unknown to historians. Apart from a very few who have seen these documents essentially as fraudulent, historians have generally seen them as uniquely vox populi. Tocqueville, for example, described them as “an authentic account” of the ideas and feelings of the nation drawn up “in perfect freedom”. More recently, Guy Chaussinand-Nogaret saw them as “the truest sampling of opinion ever realized in the France of the Old Regime”.
The procedures by which deputies were selected to represent the clergy, nobility, and commoners at the Estates General of 1789 were quite complex, and differed for the three estates. In most of France, rural communities met in face-to-face assemblies to elect their delegates to a higher assembly, the assembly of the commoners – the third estate – of the basic electoral circumscription, the bailliage. There they met with town delegates chosen at a town assembly, who, in many towns, were themselves elected by the town's corporate groupings, such as its guilds and professional bodies.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Petitions in Social History , pp. 79 - 106Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2002