Our own Professor Dave Andress has a new journal article published in the latest issue of Historical Journal, “The Language of confiance and the French cahiers de doléances of 1789”, which you can read in full on open access here.
With increasing historiographical attention to the emotional content of French revolutionary politics, the unprecedented nationwide consultation that produced the cahiers de doléances of 1789, ‘registers of grievances’, drawn up by localities to the Estates-General convocation, now available as a searchable digitised corpus of four million words, offers a way to explore the hopes, fears, and concerns of thousands of French people who participated in the cahiers’ composition.
Cahier des doléances for the Island of Corsica, Archives Nationale, France, 1789
The article analyses these documents, which described as ‘a remarkable corpus of political expression’, focusing on their use of the concept of ‘trust’ (confiance), to find new evidence on the nature and shape of the political relationships the writers believed they inhabited, and on the extent to which they were enacting agency over the prospect of change. Their trust is shown to be conditional and assertive, a high standard and an exacting expectation. The documents they left behind manifest their desire to have and to keep political agency, and to actively maintain a relationship between their local wishes and the evolution of national structures.
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