I had to write my first field exam yesterday and i realize that non-academics (and even some academics in departments that function differently from the JHU’s history dept) have no idea what i am talking about… consider this a contribution to general curiosity. Below is the email i rec’d at 10am and my responses with an edited version of my advisor’s comments. I passed (so this isn’t suspenseful).
General Exam
Minor Field: Old Regime and Revolutionary France, 1500-1800
May 7, 2010
You have eight hours to complete this exam. You are free to consult whatever books or notes you wish. The essays should be carefully written enough to make a clear and cogent argument, but they should also be extensive enough to address the questions fully, with substantive and specific references to the historiography and the historical evidence. I do not expect perfectly polished writing, exact quotations, or full citations of your evidence. If you think there is more than one way of interpreting or approaching a given question, don’t worry about trying to guess the one I had in mind; choose the one that will allow you best to display your command of the material. Please e-mail me back your responses by 6:00 p.m..
In each of the two sections below, please answer one of the two questions. Please make sure to devote your time equally to your two essays.
Section I. Answer one of the two following questions:
1. “In politics, the peasantry is like a great mass of granite: powerful, timeless, immobile. Under the changing slogans, the participants in the Great Fear of 1789 were little different from the peasant rebels of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.” Do you agree?
2. It has been argued that the period from 1550 to 1700 marked the “triumph of Lent” in France—a successful “disciplining” of a previously unruly and rebellious popular culture. Do you agree? Why or why not?
Section II. Answer one of the two following questions:
1. “It can no longer be argued that the bourgeoisie gave birth to the French Revolution. However, it can be argued that the French Revolution gave birth to the bourgeoisie, and to the working class as well.” Discuss.
2. How should the history of France’s Caribbean colonies be integrated into the study of the French Revolution? Is it sufficient to trace the influence of the French Revolution on events in the colonies, or were there also significant ways in which these events transformed the Revolution in the metropole?
SECTION 1
1. “In politics, the peasantry is like a great mass of granite: powerful, timeless, immobile. Under the changing slogans, the participants in the Great Fear of 1789 were little different from the peasant rebels of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.” Do you agree?
The Great Fear of 1789 is a distinctive peasant rebellion for more than just its role in the Constituent Assembly’s abolishment of the privileges of the clergy and nobility on the Night of August 4, 1789. This brief essay will compare the Great Fear of 1789 with other peasant revolts of the Ancien Régime, paying particular attention to the Tard Avisés of the late sixteenth-century, in order to conclude that the causes, expectations and scope of the Great Fear were both unparalleled by previous uprisings and particular to the problems of the period of the Constitutent Assembly.
The yearly period of anxious waiting for the harvest of new grain as last-year’s stores slowly reached depletion was frequently a cause of tension among the already impoverished peasants of the French countryside who comprised the vast majority of its approximately 30 million inhabitants in 1789 (Jones, The Great Nation, 159). While the eighteenth-century had overall been a period of demographic growth, Hufton’s The Poor of Eighteenth-Century France demonstrates how traditional rural family structures were undermined by heavy taxation, partible inheritance practices and recurring periods of crisis which, while not causing widespread famine or pestilence, nevertheless undermined any attempts by the peasantry to solidify their precarious positions on the edge of sustenance levels. Migration, both across the country in seasonal patterns in order to maximize opportunities for harvest-work and to urban centres in search of domestic work and savings to begin married life, as well as outright vagabondage were key survival strategies for the rural poor even as these groups of traveling poor caused fear and evoked hostility among resident populations fearful of the added strain on their meagre resources, competition for day-labour and threats to public order. Peasant life during the Ancien Régime was fraught with tension and poor harvests could easily serve as a catalyst to disorder.
The harvest of 1787 and 1788 had been particularly poor and the cahier des doléances had encouraged the peasantry in their belief that government intervention would alleviate much of the seemingly-inevitable misery. Expectations in June 1789 were high, but unmet by the Constituent Assembly. A series of panic-driven peasant revolts spread across the French countryside leaving few areas untouched. In some areas, such as Flanders, lower Normandy and Alsace, the peasantry broke into violent revolt involving attacks on symbols of seigneurial power and pillaging (Jones, The Great Nation, 419). This focus of violence on the seigneurs, who over the past century had continued to distance themselves from their traditional role as arbiter in the countryside and, like the urban elites in the provinces, become more and more concerned with court society (see Hoffman, Growth in a Traditional Society and Schneider, Public Life in Toulouse) belied a growing sense of alienation from the seigneurs as felt by (at least some of) the peasantry.
The catalyst that turned local fears over brigands roaming the countryside to destroy the new harvest into outright panic and insurrection has been the subject of some debate among historians. In 1932, Georges Lefebvre posited as the mystical “multiplicateur” that turned a few, local panics into widespread fear and unrest, a (false) rumour that the aristocracy was conspiring to destroy the harvest by hiring brigands and, thus, profit further from the ensuring misery of the peasantry (Tackett, “La Grande Peur et le complot aristocratique,” 1). Lefebvre’s explanation draws parallels between the urban poor in Paris (and their fears of aristocratic conspiracy) and the rural poor of France as a whole. However, Timothy Tackett has recently offered a revision of Lefebvre’s seminal thesis that nuances many of its conclusions.
Although Tackett begins his article with a detailed overview of Lefebvre’s study and its contribution to our understanding of the French Revolution, he nevertheless quickly points out the main flaw in Lefebvre’s argument: Rumours of aristocratic conspiracy could not have travelled from the Paris across the countryside quickly enough to account for the Great Fear and, thus, such rumours must be found BEFORE the state of general panic breaks out in rural areas (2). Tackett’s analysis demonstrates that rather than fears that the aristocracy were behind the (supposed) groups of bandits maurading the countryside and the grain in the fields, these groups of armed men were generally believed to be part of a foreign armed force on French soil. For example, in Vivarais, it was believed that 10,000 Piedmontese were plundering the countryside while in other areas the armed men were characterized as either English, bandits, arsonists, thieves and vagabonds (4-5). Tackett emphasises the lack of homogeneity among the initial attributions by the peasants of the expected calamities to a particular group. He further demonstates the particularities of each region’s panic by demonstrating not only the differing concerns of the peasants (Northerners were more fearful for the harvest and Southerners for buildings and people) as well as their reactions to the realization that their panic was unfounded. While some individual aristocrats were attacked in retribution for having incited panic for their own financial benefit, others had contributed to the defensive preparations of their communities and, hence, avoided such condemnation (6-7). Tackett thus posits that the “mystical muliplier” sought for by Lefebvre cannot be aristocratic conspiracy, but rather fear of eminent anarchy. The Great Fear of 1789 needs to be understood within the political context of a delaying Constituent Assembly that appeared unresponsive to the cahiers des doléances and peasant misery in general. The rumour of unchecked brigands roaming the countryside, unchecked by the intervention of the French government, was only made plausible by the fears that government was no longer governing.
The exact motives of the participants in the rural insurrections of the Summer of 1789 appears to have been largely contingent on their particular social context, however, the anti-seigneurial thread of some of their number posed a serious threat to the National Assembly which decided that it would be best to claim credit for any changes the peasant revolution would bring about in political structure. On August 4, 1789, feudalism was abolished in order to restore order to the countryside. While the members of the Constituent Assembly were successful in their aims, it seems doubtful that such a conclusion was in the minds of the peasants as they rose up in fear that next year’s harvest would never make it to their tables.
Peasant revolt was clearly not a new phenomenon in late eighteenth-century France: the fourteenth-century saw the Jacquerie in the Oise Valley, the sixteenth-century saw the Tards-Avisés and the seventeenth-century Croquants rebellions. Yves-Marie Bercé, in History of the Peasant Revolts, concludes
Peasant revolts of the years 1789-92 had much in common with their seventeenth-century counterparts: unanimity of the rural community, rejection of new taxation to which they were unaccustomed, defiance of enemy townsmen and a belief that there would be a general remission in taxes, particularly when the king decided to convene the estates general. In spite of all that is suggested by the political history of the period, the peasant disturbances at the beginning of the French Revolution did not depart from the typical community revolt of the proceeding century (339).
First published in 1986, however, Bercé’s account cannot take into consideration some of the striking findings put forth by Timothy Tackett as outlined above nor does it account for some other distinctive elements of the Great Fear.
The usual cause of communal violence was “an assault launched from outside upon the community as a whole” whether that outsider be those profiting from unfairly high bread prices, maurading bandits, witches or magistrates abusing power (Bercé, 39). This statement about sixteenth- and seventeenth-century uprisings appears, at first, to apply equally to the Great Fear of 1789. However, a distinctive aspect of the latter was an ambiguous outsider at the outset of disturbance. Whether the brigands were English, Piedmontese or merely vagabonds was not easily determined and, when the Great Fear had spread to its largest expanse, it was a system, feudalism, rather than a specific person or group, at which its animosity was directed. Earlier revolts had not been subversive, but rather looked to a golden age that they wished to be reinstated; the socio-political system was implicitly validated by a critique of recent changes in favour of tradition and custom (332). The Cahiers des doléances had opened the door to the people’s opinion directly affecting social circumstances and policy and the Great Fear evidences this change.
The most glaring difference between the Great Fear of 1789 and previous peasant revolts is its scope. Spreading from a half-dozen or so separate nuclei across the countryside, almost all of France found itself in rural uproad. In the sixteenth- and seventeenth-centuries, revolt was almost always contained within the borders of a single province (322). This change in magnitude reflects to what extent social discontent was with the entire governmental system (and its ineffectiveness) rather than with anything particular to a locality. While the specific manifestation of the fear of brigands (who they were, what they were most likely to attack) may have been contingent upon local contexts, as Tackett argues, nevertheless, that the brigands were perceived as a genuinethreat to the peasants across the country in a wide-variety of local contexts speaks to a more systemic disorder.
It is worthwhile to compare the peasant revolts of the Tard Avisés directly with the Great Fear of 1789 in order to demonstrate some key similarities and differences. From 1593-1595, in Limousin and Périgord, groups of peasants rose up against armed forces that occupied the countryside and raised funds by levying taxes and ransom. In a series of assemblies, the Croquants, as they were derogatively called, worked on a military plan for action and successfully expelled the garrisons from their lands. Bercé analyses the letters between these assemblies in order to conclude that they justified their armed resistance as opposition to unjust claims on their property. When the chaotic political situation was stabilized with the coronation of Henry IV, the revolts ended and the peasants were eventually accorded the tax rebate they had demanded earlier. The Tards-Avisés had specific goals and achieved them; the same cannot be said of the participants in the Great Fear.
The Great Fear of 1789 broke with another pattern typical of peasant revolts in earlier centuries. The panic lasted for more than a few weeks and during the most labour-intensive months of the year. The Tards-Avisés and other revolts of the sixteenth- and seventeenth-centuries occurred during the Spring months when the peasants had spare time. The panic of brigands destroying the harvest was so great in 1789 that peasants actually forgoed working on the harvest in late June and July. The pragmatism of the previous results, which had produced real results, had disappeared by the end of the Ancien Régime.
Communal violence was but one tactic out of many for opposing an enemy and the peasants of the sixteenth- and seventeenth-centuries, drawing on a heritage of communal justice, might rise up to prevent enclosement of a communal grazing space, like a marsh, to demand lower bread prices, or to evade their taxes. During the reign of Louis XIV, however, popular revolt became less and less of a viable option for reform as the state became better able to respond to insurgency and addressed many of the issues at the heart of peasant revolt. Reforms in the military structure prevented French soldiers from plundering French soil and armed conflict with other powers was not fought at home. Thus, the threat of roaming bandits was a particularly poignant one – it evoked an era of lawlessness which the French monarchy had successfully countered in previous years. The nobles who had approved of the Tard Avisés’ opposition to predatory garrisons were now those very nobles sitting on the Constituent Assembly.
There was much in common between the peasantry in the Great Fear of 1789 and the peasants of the revolts of the sixteenth- and seventeenth-centuries, but they were not unmalleable nor unchanged by the experience of Bourbon rule and its subsequent dissolution. Without the monarchy or a replacement government to administer and protect the people, the harvest, and with it, life itself, was in grave danger. Only within the context of the National Assembly can we hope to understand how the Great Fear of 1789 spread with such voracity and spurred on the abolition of feudalism.
SECTION 2
1. How should the history of France’s Caribbean colonies be integrated into the study of the French Revolution? Is it sufficient to trace the influence of the French Revolution on events in the colonies, or were there also significant ways in which these events transformed the Revolution in the metropole?
In the winters of 1792 and 1793, economic instability drove up the cost of consumer goods. The working people of Paris, displeased, took to the streets with violence action. The “sugar-riots” were instrumental in the radicalization of Revolutionary politics and helped bring Robespierre to power with sans-culottes support. The rising cost of necessities was obviously the result of war and sugar supply, in particular, was affected both by conflict with England in the Carribean and by political developments on the Carribean islands themselves. Major social and political movements, such as the sugar-riots, which demonstrate how events in the colonies affected people on the continent make it difficult to disagree with Laurent Dubois’ recent claim in “An Atlantic Revolution:”
The French Revolution was an Atlantic Revolution…. The eighteenth-century economic world out of which it emerged had been shaped by 150 years of Atlantic commerce driven by expansion…. The political worlds of both the Old Regime and the French Revolution were affected in varied ways by struggles over slavery and color, and the revolutionary wars took place in an Atlantic context in which the Carribean theater of war played a central role. The loss of Saint-Domingue, finally, represented a major transformation and reorientation in the French empire (655).
This brief paper will discuss both the benefits of a colonial perspective to the French Revolution.
Dazzled by the bright lights of the big city and (perversely) fascinated by the political intrigue and executions during the Terror, it is easy to lose sight of the periphery when studying the French Revolution. However, there is much that a focus on the marginal can offer to our understandings of this tumultous period. For example, in 1794, the National Convention ratified a local decision made in Saint-Domingue a year earlier and abolished slavery throughout the French Empire. The colonial population had radically expanded the terms of Republican citizenship (Dubois, Colony of Citizens, 3). Instances as clear cut, however, of events in the colonies directly influencing the political ideology of the Revolutionaries are few and far between. This is not to say, however, that the mentalités of the metropolitan politicians was unaffected by news from the Carribean. Rather, we must sift through the material and look for other instances to corroborate our findings.
For example, until 1791, the abolitionist movement focused on a rhetoric of sympathy for the enslaved. After the Slave Revolt, with its extreme violence, creates an image of slaves as inhuman monsters slaughtering women and children. A comparison of this rhetoric of dehumanization to validate a draconian policy to the rhetoric of revolutionary leaders’ hostility towards first the English government and then the entire English people as meriting destruction, as discussed by Sophie Wahnich in L’impossible citoyen, can only help us better understand both of these changing visions of the “other.”
The debates over slavery, both in the colonies and in the National Convention, also demonstrate some of the tensions inherent in Revolutionary rhetoric. The conflict between property rights and equality was a main obstacle for abolitionists and also a source of contention for much of the continental populace. Emancipation struck at the heart of an economic system central to the French empire in much the same way that equitable inheritance struck at foundations of family, the basis for all social groups. Suzanne Desan has artfully demonstrated how petitioners set about overturning many of the revolutionary reforms in favour of traditional conceptions of family and property in “Reconstituting the Social after the Terror: Family, Property, and the Law in Popular Politics.” Scholarship on the colonial debates can help illuminate some of the implicit claims about property rights, equality and liberty in the metropolitan context, and vice-versa.
In the introduction of A Colony of Citizens, Laurent Dubois argues that “the actions of slaves-turned citizens in the Carribean transformed Europe and the Americas. During the early 1790s, slave insurgents gave new content to the abstract universality of the language of rights, expanding the political culture as they demanded Republican citizenship and racial equality” (2). At first glance, this claim might appear over-stated and difficult to substantiate. It would be an arduous task on its own to demonstrate that Europe and the Americas were “transformed” in the early 1790s. What exactly constitutes a transformation and how can it be attributed to the actions of a single group, living in a hinterland, and to whom the Revolutionaries appear to have paid little attention? Such a claim is implicit in many studies about the Revolution affected other marginalized members of French society: women, Jews, foreigners, etc. Although any such study alone will have difficulty claiming that a single group appropriated the “abstract universailty of the language of rights,” the ways in which each liminal community added content to these abstract principles demonstrates the possibilities open to the entire population, both metropolitan and colonial. Debates about rights and their praxis were integral to the eventual development of a new legal and juridical system.
The study of the Carribean colonies offers more than just different interpreted lens to Revolutionary rhetoric. The Revolutionaries attempted to erect a brand-new political system while simultaneously fighting a war on many fronts. The naval and military battles in the Carribean against the English were major expenditures and important to the entire French economy. Studies on the economic impact of the Atlantic arena, both on the port towns that controlled most of the shipping and on consumer products as a whole, can only help us better understand the grave problems the Revolutionaries faced. Thus, the Carribean should be an area of concern for both military and economic historians of the Revolutionary period. Theda Skocpol and Meyer Kestnbaum would appear to implicitly advocate such an approach in “Mars Unshackled: The French Revolution in World-Historical Perspective” which portrays the war as the most important component of the Revolution for turning the Revolution into an international geopolitical issue.
The story of the Caribbean is in many ways a sad one: slavery was reinstituted under Napoleonic rule and Haiti remains poverty-stricken today, still suffering from its ostracization by the imperial powers. The story of the Age of Revolutions in the Carribean merits attention per se. The manners by which enslaved peoples attempt to better their lot and the privileged attempt to maintain the status quo demonstrate both the possibilities and limitations on social change. The geographic differences between Saint-Dominigue, Guadeloupe and Martinique in many ways demonstrate to what extent society and its members are constrained by natural frontiers. The language of rights, patriotism and liberty, as adopted by the rebels on April 20, 1793 in many ways epitomizes one of the claims made by Keith Michael Baker (among others) in Inventing the Revolution: Language serves as more than an expression of the ideas of revolutionaries, but also as a force which shaped the way people thought and acted in unanticipated ways.
A colonial perspective offers much to the study of the French Revolution. It adds nuance to military, economic, social, political and intellectual history emphasising conflicts and tensions that might otherwise go unnoticed and corroborating findings in other studies, particularly of the marginalized. However, it is important not to overstate the influence of colonial developments on the decision-making in the metropole. Revolutionaries were more concerned with the Vendée, conspiracy, and the constitution of a “nation” than they were with the Caribbean colonies. Nevertheless, events in the the Carribean colonies, which had come to occupy such an important place in the economic well-being of the French empire, sent reverberations throughout the world. Rather unsurprisingly, we would do well to respect the diachronic relationship between periphery and core.
Your first essay is particularly good. You bring in Tackett very effectively, and you use it to take issue with Bercé quite nicely. You might have talked a bit more about the overall scope of 17th-century rebellions, and your discussion of the Tard-Avisés comes somewhat late (had you had the time to rewrite, you might have put it before your major discussion of the Grande Peur). Still, it is very complete, cogent and persuasive.
The second essay is fine, and covers all the bases very effectively. My only criticism is that you don’t really do enough to trace the more obvious part of the equation, namely the impact of the French Revolution on the events in the Caribbean. I would have liked a somewhat more systematic discussion of the initial troubles on Saint-Domingue, the revolt of the free people of color, and then a more in-depth discussion of the slave rebellion of 1791 itself. Overall, the exam paper was relatively short, and you might have had time to include a little more.
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, 3rd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1991), esp. 1-41.![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=5c9e043d-a3ed-4c01-9ba2-a27eccc8efcc)
