Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
A Show of Hands for the Republic: Opinion, Information, and Repression in Eighteenth-Century Rural France

A Show of Hands for the Republic: Opinion, Information, and Repression in Eighteenth-Century Rural France

Jill Walshaw, Jill

Hardcover

Series: Changing Perspectives on Early Modern Europe, Book 16

Literary CriticismFrench HistoryGeneral World History

ISBN10: 1580464793
ISBN13: 9781580464796
Publisher: University of Rochester Press
Published: May 15 2014
Pages: 322
Weight: 1.42
Height: 0.88 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
A fresh perspective on rural responses to the French Revolution, using sedition investigations to reveal how villagers took their place on the political stage.

In the French village of Segonzac in 1796, weaver Thomas Bordas spoke out during a municipal ceremony. Frustrated by how stifling the politics of the Revolution had become, he proposed a show of hands: who wants a republic, and who wants a king? Soon after, he was arrested and charged with attempting to reestablish the monarchy.

Drawing on archival sources ranging from village council minutes and reports of government spies to investigations into sedition and seditious speech, A Show of Hands for the Republic provides a new account of the politicization of the French peasantry from the early eighteenth century through the Revolution. Jill Maciak Walshaw demonstrates here that villagers were well-informed and outspoken on political issues. In addition, though the political authorities characterized peasants as ignorant and easily manipulated, Walshaw shows that the ruling elite also carefully monitored and suppressed their opinions, revealing a contradiction in the governing practices of the state.

By documenting the lively political forum that existed in eighteenth-century rural France, this study challenges not only the bourgeois nature of the public sphere, as defined by Jürgen Habermas, but also the notion that it was predominantly urban. A Show of Hands for the Republic presents a fresh understanding of rural political culture, one in which villagers responded to revolutionary change with their own agenda and came to play a new role on the political stage.

Jill Maciak Walshaw is assistant professor of history at the University of Victoria, British Columbia.

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