Liberty and Locality in Revolutionary France: Six Villages Compared, 1760-1820 (review)

Explaining what the French Revolution meant to millions of French villagers is a notoriously difficult undertaking. Officials charged with governance, policing, tax collecting, and conscription were convinced that the country people were backward, ignorant, fanatic, incompetent, disobedient, unruly, disloyal, and unmanageable. For these officials, the revolutionary project meant hauling reluctant villagers to a better future in spite of themselves.

Jones examines the villages from the inside and comes away with a different impression. He argues that the period witnessed the birth of a new "civic landscape," which, despite all of the vagaries of the revolutionary decades and all of the backward steps, nonetheless transformed the villagers of 1815 into different people from what they had been in 1760. Jones selected six villages scattered around France from Lorraine to Brittany and from Provence to the foothills of the Pyrenees to write a comparative microhistory that could capture at least a part of the common experience of these villagers and, by extension, the experience of the millions of others throughout the period. Moreover, he brings a formidable degree of archival research to the task, sources in no less than twenty different repositories and an examination of hundreds of bundles of documents.

The high-water mark of civic consciousness was early in the Revolution, but the slippage after 1792 was never complete. By 1815, villagers were aware of the advantages of a uniform bureaucratic administration, of a regime of laws; of equitable, albeit higher taxes; and above all, of the end of royal arbitrariness and seigneurial vexations.

Reasonable as these propositions might be, the book has an undigested quality about it. Jones writes that in three of the villages, the "easing of surplus extraction, whether in the form of the tithe or feudal dues, would have been commemorated." Yet, in the very next sentence, he states that postrevolutionary taxes were higher. Did the debit, in fact, cancel out the credit (269)?

The data could also have been put through a finer mesh. Revolutionary and imperial officialdom left behind considerable documentation that could be exploited to test for civic awareness, but Jones has not made full use of it. Voter turnout; national-guard participation; continuity of local elected personnel; obedience to conscription laws; support for, or opposition to, the religious settlement; buyers of national property; desertion; participation in local Jacobin clubs (if there were any); people arrested by the terrorist watch committees; and much else are frequently discussed in the narrative but never presented in tabular form. The result is a hazy and unsystematic view of how the revolutionary and imperial state engaged with its citizenry.

One graphic illustration of the frequency of meetings of "deliberative assemblies" shows a sharp upswing in the early 1790s before an abrupt fall (122). Jones claims that it represents a massive democratization of power, which he describes as "self-rule." In fact, it shows only that the municipal councils had much to do during the early years of the Revolution. Sovereign power or administrative autonomy were never divested from the center to village councils at any point between the Old Regime and the Bourbon Restoration. Instead, councils were the last stop in an administrative hierarchy that began in Paris. Councils were weak institutions that did not even own their own property, as several decisions of the Council of State proved in 1801/2, and which Napoleon demonstrated when he seized communal property to finance the war effort in 1813.

Village communities, as opposed to councils, were the bedrock of rural France. How these communities worked, how they related to the modernizing state, and why they were such headaches to the arrogant officials who took on the mission of civilizing them are themes implicit in this book that need to be explored much further.