Revolutionary Demands: A Content Analysis of the "Cahiers de Doleances" of 1789 (review)

Revolutionary Demands: A Content Analysis of the "Cahiers de Doléances" of 1789. By Gilbert Shapiro and John Markoff (Stanford, Stanford University Press, 1998) 684 pp. $75.00

Shapiro and Markoff have made an important, and explicitly interdisciplinary, contribution to the study of history. The first fruit of a project begun nearly forty years ago, this weighty tome attempts to apply the methods of social science to a specific historical problem--the state of public opinion on the eve of the French Revolution. In point of fact, Shapiro and Markoff have written three books not one. As Charles Tilly notes in the preface, this book is "an authoritative introduction to content analysis as in intellectual discipline; a critical presentation of the cahiers de doléances [lists of grievances] as an historical product and source; [and] a sampler of analyses actually employing the cahiers in the Shapiro-Markoff transcription" (xxvii). In sum, this book is an impressive attempt to create and utilize an electronic data archive relating to social life and social problems at the outbreak of a great revolution, namely, the French.

In the interest of space, this review cannot treat the eight fine articles presented in Part IV (all of which have appeared elsewhere) that analyze the cahiers using the Shapiro-Markoff data. It is particularly illuminating to reread Timothy Tackett, "The West in France in 1789: The Religious Factor in the Origins of the Counterrevolution," in light of the Shapiro-Markoff source of some of his data (325-345). Although all of the articles are well done and demonstrate some of the archive's uses, they are not why this book is both useful and important.

Shapiro and Markoff undertook to present a "quasi-experimental" content analysis of a sample of the variously sized lists of grievances composed during the spring of 1789 most notably by parishes, urban corporations, bailliage assemblies, groups of nobles, and clergy (9). Among the huge number of documents available, they chose to investigate the 198 bailliage cahiers of the Third Estate, 167 noble cahiers, and the parish cahiers of 46 bailliages. Each grievance found anywhere in these cahiers has been broken down by subject and the action demanded and entered into a hierarchically organized code (79). This work was done by extensively trained human coders; it compares favorably with the results of professional historians (207).

The genuine contribution of this book is that it helps the hard- science side of the social sciences to communicate with the mainstream of the historical profession. In clear prose with a minimum of jargon, it lays out the difficulties of utilizing a genuinely scientific content analysis for an enormously complex historical situation, while simultaneously explaining the rationale for, and use of, the methods of scientific social science. Shapiro and Markoff have succeeded both in explaining the utility of their social scientific methods and demonstrating the difficulties of local context and interpretation for the theoretical and methodological concerns of the social scientist. The Shapiro-Markoff model for interdisciplinary work in the construction of an electronic data archive treating a historical problem is a major element of this book's significance.

The volume is most satisfying in its clear methodology and its painstaking attempt to explain the difficulties in the construction of the code and coding procedures as well as in the development of the training program. It will surely be used as a model, as the authors hoped. Unfortunately, the fantastic amount of time, huge financial investment, com- puter programming requirements, and the aforementioned difficulties of overseeing the coding process probably will not make anyone rush out to start such a project. Historians might also be troubled by the fact that the problematic of much of the treatment of the old regime was formulated more than thirty years ago and often appears outdated. Such quibbles aside, this book will be of particular interest...