Cahiers de Doléances
The Cahiers de Doléances ( Book of Appeal) are the instructions given by voters to the representatives of the Estates-General .
When the French king called on his subjects on January 24, 1789 to elect their deputies for the Estates General, he asked them at the same time to give these deputies instructions on what problems they should solve. So the MPs had an imperative mandate .
So in theory there was a complaint book for each constituency, and in fact around 60,000 of them have survived.
The complaint books were created at meetings in the villages or they were compiled by politically interested parties - at least that is what the style of language and the structure of the various complaint books suggest.
Complaints about high taxes, unjust feudal taxes and privileges of the landlord were particularly frequent. Political demands (such as the regular convening of the Estates General), on the other hand, were made only rarely and more often in urban constituencies.
The Cahiers de Doléances no longer played a major role in the course of the French Revolution .
Their value as a source in historical studies is controversial. It is true that here is the rare case where almost all members of a country were asked for their opinion and one learned something about the state of affairs of the lower classes. However, all the statements of the mostly illiterate farmers had to be written down by typists, and it is difficult to estimate how much they made editorial or even content changes.
literature
- Ernst Schulin : The French Revolution . 4th edition. CH Beck, Munich 2004, ISBN 3-406-51262-3 .
- Hans-Ulrich Thamer : The French Revolution . CH Beck, Munich 2004, ISBN 3-406-50847-2 .
- Klaus Zimmermann: Linguistic acts in the Cahiers de Doléances of 1789. In: Zeitschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Linguistik 41 (1981), pp. 52-69.
See also
2018/19
Individual evidence
- ↑ Thamer, p. 26.