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Challenging the Seigneurie: Community and Contention on the Eve of the French Revolution

In July 1789, peasants in parts of France took their own cause in hand by attacking the chateaux of their lords. Peasants wanted to force a renunciation of manorial dues, even if that required burning the documents that authorized payment. Where the peasants did not attack, they resisted by refusing to pay. The vehemence of these outbreaks may have surprised contemporaries, but hostility to manorial dues was not new. The antiseigneurial theme of the July revolts was prefigured by several decades of difficulty during which peasant communities initiated numerous court cases to reduce the burden of feudal dues. In Burgundy, those disputes left behind a great deal of documentation in both the judicial and administrative archives of the Old Regime. Yet, even those historians eeking to understand the outbreaks of 1789 have spent little time studying the litigation. This lack of interest in such a rich archival source can be explained very simply. The consensus is that the resistance and antagonism of the peasantry was a reaction to the increased demands of the seigneurie during a period of economic crisis. Seigneurs were asserting lapsed feudal dues at a time when the economy was in recession. There seemed to be, then, no need to examine the court cases since the explanation for their proliferation was thought well established. Had the court cases received greater attention, it would have become clear that the origins of the peasantry's discontent were much more complicated. In fact, the disputes did not generally focus on new or unprecedented exactions or innovative ways of enforcing lapsed obligations; rather, under attack were seigneurial rights and privileges that had gone largely unquestioned for centuries. This analysis of the litigation suggests that a different hypothesis is necessary to explain the growing antiseigneurialism. In particular, examination of the administrative channels through which the court cases had to pass reveals much about the institutional changes that had destabilized society. Those institutional changes, in turn, had important ideological consequences. They played a part in preparing the night of August 4, 1789, when the Constituent Assembly abolished feudal dues, for the assembly drew both ideas and personnel from the court cases.