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Peasants Protest: The Claims of Lord, Church, and State in the Cahiers de doléances of 1789

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 June 2009

John Markoff
John Markoff
Affiliation:
University of Pittsburgh
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Extract

For all the attention the rural insurrection of 1789 has 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 transformation of the French countryside. He is struck by the contrast with the great seventeenth-century movements of violent resistance to the fiscal pressures of the growing state. After a long interval in which the defeated peasantry raised no major challenge, the distinctive target of the rural upheavals of the early revolution had switched from the claims of the state to those of the lord. Understanding this shift, Le Roy Ladurie suggests, should illuminate the rural history of France in modern times. Why do peasants rise against one target rather than another? To date there is little scholarly consensus on the forms and significance of the rural insurrection.

Type
People, Power, and Revolution
Information
Comparative Studies in Society and History , Volume 32 , Issue 3 , July 1990 , pp. 413 - 454
Copyright
Copyright © Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History 1990

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References

1 Ladurie, Emmanuel Le Roy, “Révoltes et contestations rurales en France de 1675 à 1788,” Annales: Economies, Sociétés, Civilisations, 29 (1974), 6–22. Meticulous enumeration of rural disturbances from 1661 into the spring of 1789 carried out by Jean Nicolas refines the picture. His preliminary evidence demonstrates the continuing domination of actions directed against state taxation (and other forms of state activity for that matter) and, in hard times, of subsistence events. He also shows that in the immediate prerevolutionary period, although antiseigneurial actions were clearly on the rise, they were still far outnumbered by these more traditional targets. See Nicolas, “Les Emotions dans l'ordinateur: premiers resultats d'une enquête collective” (paper presented at Université Paris VII, 1986).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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5 Lefebvre, , Les Paysans du Nord pendant la Révolution française (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,” 350–3.Google Scholar

6 Ibid., 149.

7 Ibid., 162–3.

8 A skeptical review of this literature may be found in Doyle, William, “Was There an Aristocratic Reaction in Pre-Revolutionary France?”; Past and Present, no. 57 (11 1972), 97–122.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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19 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 illuminating the gulf that separated the great rural majority from the elites.” For another comparison of the most common demands, see Shapiro, Gilbert, “Les Demandes les plus répandues dans les cahiers de doléances,” in Image de la Révolution Française, Vovelle, Michel, ed. (Paris: Pergamon Press, 1989), 7–14.Google Scholar

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22 Consider our entire corpus of 26,230 grievances of the notables and 46,376 grievances of the Third Estate. Of these, a rather higher proportion of noble demands concern the very broad area of “government” (37.9 percent versus 31.5 percent). Among grievances which deal with “government,” we find that “government finances” are more salient for the nobility (21.4 percent versus 14.2 percent).

23 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 despotism of the tax collector." Our data suggest the conjunction of liberty and finance to be particularly characteristic of the nobility. See Riley, James C., The Seven Years War and the Old Regime in France: The Economic and Financial Toll (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), 218.Google Scholar

24 While censorship, for example, is among the top ten topics for nobility and Third Estate, it is relegated to the two hundred thirty-third position by the parishes.

25 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 of the institutional context of the gabelle.

26 The valuable essay by François Hinker, for example virtually ignores the droit de contrôle and related taxes. See Hinker, François, Les Franças devant l'impôt sous l' ancien regime (Paris: Flammarion, 1971).Google Scholar

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33 Consider this demand in the cahier of the nobility of Limoges: “That the bearing of arms may only be tolerated for military personnel in uniform and for nobles dressed in any manner whatsoever” (Mavidal, J. and Laurent, E., eds., Archives parlementaires de 1787 à 1860, first series [Paris: Librairie Administrative de Paul Dupont, 1789], vol. 3, 569)Google Scholar; or consider the frequency with which the French nobility chose military officers to represent them at the Estates-General (Bien, David, “La Réaction aristocratique avant 1789: L'exemple de l'armée,” Annales: Economies, Sociétés Civilisations, 29 (01-02 1974), 23–48, (03-04 1974), 505–34).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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36 I considered a subject to be an instance of a burden if it dealt with claims by state, church, or lord or with some other appropriation of resources (like legal fees). There are other subjects some of whose aspects involve such claims which I omitted. 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.

37 The ambiguity for the nobility resides in the tie for last place, which includes taxes and other grievances.

38 If we considered other exactions (legal fees, for example) these figures would not only be a bit higher, but the difference between the France of the village and the elites would be also somewhat greater.

39 Taylor, , “Revolutionary and Non-Revolutionary Content in the Cahiers,” 489–502.Google Scholar

40 Cahiers which call for reform but also insist that an institution be maintained are also only characteristic of the nobility on seigneurial rights.

41 This is the first of several points where my sifting of evidence diverges in important ways from George Taylor's study of the cahiers. One reason is the difference in coding: Taylor does not distinguish the agenda from the program: that is, he does not separately code the subject under discussion as well 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 of the revolutionary assemblies—but the support for change of some sort (as assessed by examining the actions demanded) is very substantial; and although I find with Taylor 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.

42 Alfred Cobban's view of the peasants as markedly more radical on the seigneurial regime than the triumphant urban groups which they had to push beyond foot dragging is specifically repudiated by Taylor, . (Cobban, Social interpretation of the French Revolution, 53Google Scholar; Taylor, , “Revolutionary and Non-Revolutionary Content in the Cahiers,” 495–6.)Google Scholar

43 The mean number of demands is 40 for parishes, 234 for the Third Estate, and 158 for the nobility. See Markoll, John and Shapiro, Gilbert, “Consensus and Conflict at the Onset of Revolution,” 39.Google Scholar

44 Les Inconvéniens des droits féodaux (London: Valade, 1776).Google Scholar

45 Cobban's summary claim with regard to “the men who drew up the cahiers in the towns and the members of the tiers etat in the National Assembly” is that “there can be no doubt of their opposition to the abolition of seigneurial dues and right” (Social Interpretation, 43).Google Scholar

46 Ado, A. V., Krestianskoe dvijhenie vo frantsii vo vremiia velikoi burjhuaznoi revoliutsii kontsa XVIII veka (Moscow: University of Moscow Editions, 1971), p. 97.Google Scholar

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48 For a more adequate appreciation of the complexity of the Third Estate's position, it is necessary to examine their views on indemnification for individual seigneurial rights, rather than the position of the parishes considered here. I defer such an analysis and the confrontation of this evidence with Cobban's thesis to another place. The parish evidence, however, is adequate to show how dubious is Cobban's equation of support for indemnification with a concealed desire for conservation.

49 For the legislation of March 15, 1790, see Mavidal, J. and Laurent, E., Archives Parlementaires de 1787 à 1860 (primière série) (Paris: Libraireie Administrative de P. Dupont, 1879), 12, 172–7.Google Scholar

50 That it did fail is abundantly clear from local and regional studies. The peasants rarely paid the indemnities. In some places very few took advantage of the indemnificatory aspects of the new laws; in others, some people did, but these were largely anything but peasants. In CharenteInférieure, 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 and its suburbs. In the département of the Nord, most indemnifications were made by bourgeois proprietors or even nobles (including the Duke of Orleans). In other départements studied in Brittany, Normandy, Franche-Comté and Limousin, indemnification seems hardly to have taken place at all. See Luc, J. N. “Le Rachat des droits féodaux dans le département de la Charente-Inférieure (1789–1793),” in Contribution à I'Histoire Paysanne de la Révolution Française Soboul, Albert, ed. (Paris: Editions Sociales, 1977), 332–3, 345Google Scholar; Ferradou, André, Le Rachat des droits féodaux dans la Gironde, 1790–1793 (Paris: Sirey, 1928), 210–2Google Scholar; Garaud, R., Le Rachat des Droits Féodaux et des Dîmes Inféodées en Haute-Vienne (Limoges: Impmerie Dupuy-Moulinier, 1939)Google Scholar; Millot, Jean, L'Abolition des Droits Seigneuriaux dans le Departement du Doubs et la Region Comtois (Besançon: Imprimerie Millot Freres, 1941), 172–96Google Scholar; Lefebvre, Georges, Les Paysans du Nord, 387–90Google Scholar; Goujard, Ph., “L'Abolition de la féodalalité dans le district de Neuchâtel (Seine-Inférieure),” in Soboul, ed., Contributions à l'Histoire Paysanne, 366–73Google Scholar; Sutherland, Donald, The Chouans: The Social Origins of Popular Counter-Revolution in Upper Brittany, 1770–1796 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982), 139–41.Google Scholar

51 For one among many essays: “Collective Violence in European Perspective,” in The History of Violence in America, Graham, Hugh Davis and Gurr, Ted Robert, eds. (New York: Bantam Books, 1969), 4–44.Google Scholar

52 To 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: Harvard University Press, 1986), 380–404.)Google ScholarPubMed Recently, the portrait of a traditional rural community besieged by state and market has been called into question. See Root, Hilton, Peasants and King in Burgundy: Agrarian Foundations of French Absolutism (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1987).Google Scholar

53 Various reforms had previously been instituted in several provinces prior to the decrees of the late 1780s, which 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 novelty, 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 which treat forced labor as very much a live issue. See Letaconnoux, J., Le Régime de la corvée en Bretagne au XVIII siècle (Rennes: Philman and Hommay, 1905), 100–6Google Scholar; Werner, Robert, Les Ponts et Chausees d'Alsace au dix-huitième siècle (Strasbourg: Imprimerie Heitz, 1929), 58–86, 100–14Google Scholar; Marion, Marcel, Dictionnaire des Institutions de la France au XVIle et XVIIIe siècles (Paris: Picard, 1969), 153–5Google Scholar; Arbellot, Guy, Lepetit, Bernard, and Bertrand, Jacques, Atlas de la Révolution Française. V. I. Routes et communications (Paris: Editions de l'Ecole Hautes Etudes en Science Sociales, 1987), 32.Google Scholar

54 John Bosher has demonstrated how little effective bureaucratic control existed in the direct tax system, but the vivid visibility of the General Farms was lacking (see Bosher, , French Finances, 67–110.)Google Scholar

55 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 Bouloiseau, Marc, ed., Cahiers de doléances du tiers état du bailliage de Rouen pour les dials généraux de 1789 (Rouen: Imprimerie Administrative de la Seine-Maritime, 1960), 308.Google Scholar

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57 Marion, Marcel, Les impôts directs sous l'ancien régime.Google Scholar

58 If we are at all persuaded by C. B. A. Behrens' 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 all the more striking (see Belirens, C. B. A., “Nobles, Privileges and Taxes in France at the End of the Ancien Régime,” Economic History Review (ser. 2), 15:3 (1963), 451–75CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Riley, , The Seven Years War 44–5, 54–5, 68, 71.)Google Scholar

59 Marion, , Les Impôs directs.Google Scholar

60 The cahiers are not uniform on the specific principle. Indeed they do not always even invoke one. The primary issue is that all are morally bound to participate; the precise quantitative formula to assure this participation is simply less significant than the eradication of distinctions of quality.

61 Massereau, T., Receuil des cahiers de doldéances des bailliages de Tours et de Loches et cahier général du bailliage de Chinon aux Etats généraux de 1789 (Orléans: Imprimerie Moderne, 1918), 555.Google Scholar

62 The corvée was earmarked for roads, after all, whereas what was purchased with the aides or gabelle was considerably less evident.

63 An example: The villagers of Lassay in the bailliage or 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 (Edeine, Bernard, ed., Les Assemblées préliminaires et la rédaction des cahiers de doléances dans le bailliage secondaire de Romorantin (Blots: Imprimerie Raymond Sitie, 1949), 46.)Google Scholar

64 Laurent, , ed., Bailliage de Châlons-sur-Marne, 70–71.Google Scholar

65 Analogously one finds demands for a single registration tax. If one separates droit de contrôle, the insinuation and the centième denier (unlike Tables 6 and 8, 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 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.

66 Edeine, Bernard, ed., Cahiers de doléances de Romorantin, 47. Notice that this parish proposes to deal with the titheholders by indemnifying them.Google Scholar

67 The efforts to reclaim 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 emigres 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 evolution.

68 Balencie, , Cahiers de Doléances de Bigorre, 580–1.Google Scholar

69 The classic argument for this position is that of Alexis de Toqueville. See his The Old Regime. 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 medium of lawsuits, a resistance moreover increasingly assuming the form of an attack on an abstract conception of “seigneurial rights” as illegitimate (rather than a quarrel about a specific claim), see Root, , Peasants and King in Burgundy, 155–204.Google Scholar

70 Hincker, , Les franç devant 1' impôt, 17–18.Google Scholar

71 Charier, Roger, “De 1614 à 1789: le déplacement des attentes,” in Représentation et vouloir politique. Autour des Etats-généraux de 1614, Chartier, Roger and Richet, Denis, eds. (Paris: Editions de l'Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Soiales, 1982).Google Scholar

72 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 Levi, Margaret, Of Rule and Revenue (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988)Google Scholar; and Bates, Robert H. and Lien, Da-Hsiang Donald, “A Note on Taxation, Development and Representative Government”, Politics and Society, 14 (1985), 53–70.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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74 Amorphous demands that someone do some utterly unspecified action are not only less uncommon for the nobility but also quite scarce.

75 Only 33 percent of parish cahiers have any grievances about “this province”—as compared to 78 percent of in the documents of the nobles. On the other hand, 66 percent 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 percent contain at least one strictly local complaint (“the next village rings its church bells too loudly”).

76 It is only the nobility 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, which led to the secession of Finland, Poland and the Baltic states and defeated separatist movements in the Ukraine, Transcaucasia and the Muslim regions.

77 Pipes, Richard, Russia Under the Old Regime (New York: Scribner, 1974), 162.Google Scholar

78 Riley, , Seven Years War, 39.Google Scholar

79 Ardant, , Theorie sociologique de l'impôt, 1.Google Scholar

80 Bras, Herve Le and Todd, Emmanuel, L'lnvention de la France. Atlas anthropologique et politique (Paris: Livre de Poche, 1981).Google Scholar

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83 Two other studies converge here. Régin Robin's close 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 Robin, Régine, La Société Française en 1789: Semur-enAuxois (Paris: Plon, 1970), 306–7, 330–3Google Scholar; Forster, Robert, The House of Saulx-Tavanes (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1971), 207–8.Google Scholar

84 Only the Western counterrevolution seems exceptional in its 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 Hutt, Maurice, Chouannerie and Counter-Revolution. Puisaye, the Princes and the British Government in the 1790s (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 3–5Google Scholar; Sutherland, , The Chouans, 282–5.Google Scholar

85 I try to demonstrate this in detail in Markoff, John, “Peasant Grievances and Peasant Insurrection: France in 1789,” Journal of Modern History (forthcoming).Google Scholar

86 Weber, , Peasants into Frenchmen, 242.Google Scholar