The Notables and the Nation: The Political Schooling of the French, 1787–1788 (review)

The Notables and the Nation is primarily an examination of the means by which political issues were communicated to the French public in the two years preceding the revolutionary events of 1789. Distinguishing her work from previous studies of late old-regime political culture that have concentrated largely on the political language found in pamphlets and journals, Gruder undertakes a wider study of all forms of political communication: manuscript newsletters, illustrated prints, songs, and public festivities and demonstrations, as well as journals and pamphlets. With the exception of the first three chapters on the Assembly of Notables, a chapter on eighteenth-century readers, and a final chapter on local public reaction to political events, the book is organized thematically around each of these genres, many of the chapters having appeared over the previous two decades in article form. Gruder’s goal is to determine how opposition to the royal government and noble privilege spread before 1789 and to examine, as specifically as possible, the impact of this opposition on public opinion.

Ideology plays little role in The Notables and the Nation, distinguishing this study from other works on eighteenth-century French political culture that emphasize the importance of ideological discourse before 1789.¹ Gruder’s methodology involves a thorough examination of the sources in each of her categories to determine their structure, political message, and intended audience. She also investigates the nature of the reading public to which communication was directed, the influence of political messages on that public, and the royal government’s efforts to control communication through censorship. In the end, The Notables and the Nation provides a more complete description of the means by which the French were brought into the debate about the nature of monarchical government than heretofore available.

In undertaking her task, Gruder analyzes her sources without significant reference to their historical antecedents or the ideological disputes of the era. She seems reluctant to engage the scholarship of other historians. For instance, she undertakes substantial research into the objections of lower-court magistrates to the royal judicial reform in 1788 that was designed to weaken the parlements. Yet, she makes no clear attempt to determine what, if any, relationship this resistance had to the Jansenist-inspired parlementary constitutionalism that Van Kley identified as the ideological basis of the Parlement of Paris’ resistance to royal authority after 1750. Similarly, Gruder’s impressive attempt to gauge public opinion through an examination of the vast body of largely unpublished community declarations produced in 1788 fails to place this phenomenon in the larger context of contemporary political debate. Although her discovery of a spontaneous and widespread demand for increased representation of the third estate in the Estates General is noteworthy, she ignores the ideological implications of the language of these declarations; they continued to conceptualize representation within the framework of the king’s sovereignty. This language stands in stark contrast to the most advanced political thought of late 1788 that insisted upon the sovereign authority of the general will of the nation, a significant indication that public opinion had yet to adopt an important component of national party ideology.

Despite these reservations, Gruder’s exhaustive examination of the various genres of media attempting to influence public opinion in 1787/ 88 adds much to current understanding of French political culture on the eve of the revolution.