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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 July 2009
The purposes of this article are, first, to present a theoretical discussion of peasant revolts that develops an exchange model of relations between lords and peasants and second, to use this discussion as a framework for a review of some of the work on peasant activity in eighteenth-century France. The argument, therefore, begins from social exchange; it does not privilege structures at the theoretical origin. Any analysis should specify three features of exchange: what is exchanged and the terms of trade, the potential kinds of coordinated activity present in the exchange (the relationship between hierarchy and reciprocity), and the meaning of the exchange relationship to its participants. These three features are interconnected so that, for example, specifying the kind of collective action is also to specify terms of trade and meaning.
(1) One indicator of competitive potential in violence in France was the possession of firearms, restricted by arrêts in 1716, 1719 and 1766 in an attempt by the state to protect its comparative advantage and to support seigneurial control of hunting. Enforcement varied considerably across France and private ownership of guns continued to be especially prevalent in regions of contraband activity. (And smugglers were dependent on ancien régime institutions since it was taxation on consumption goods such as salt that created their contraband business. Hence, the abolition of some of the taxes, especially the gabelle, also quickly created armed support for counter-revolution in some localities). See Dupuy, Roger, La Garde Nationale et les débuts de la Révolution en Ille-et-Vilaine (1789–1793) (Paris, Klinkscieck, 1972), pp. 28–30, 255Google Scholar; Hufton, Olwen H., Attitudes towards authority in eighteenth century Languedoc, Social History, III (11 1978), 285–286Google Scholar.
(2) Skocpol, Theda, States and Social Revolutions (New York, Cambridge University Press, 1979), p. 18CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For a more detailed discussion of Skocpol's arguments about peasant revolts, see Hudson Meadwell, Skocpol's Theory of Peasant Revolts in Social Revolutions (manuscript, available from author).
(3) See the useful discussions of intentions and non-intended consequences in Ortner, Sherry B., Theory in anthropology since the sixties, Comparative Studies in Society and History, XXVI (1984) 1, 144–157Google Scholar, and Taylor, Charles, Foucault on freedom and truth, Political Theory, XII (05, 1984), 168–172Google Scholar. The specification of unintended consequences clearly presupposes a specification of intended consequences. For example, Farr, James, The historical concept of revolution, American Journal of Political Science, XXVI (11, 1982), p. 700Google Scholar.
(4) For a discussion of perverse emergent effects, see Boudon, Raymond, Undesired consequences and types of structures of systems of interdependence, in Blau, Peter M. and Merton, Robert K. (eds.), Continuities in Structural Inquiry (London and Beverly Hills, Sage Publications, 1981), pp. 255–284Google Scholar.
(5) For a statement of exchange as a social process see Polanyi, Karl, The Livelihood of Man. Pearson, H. W. (ed.) (New York, Academic Press, 1977)Google Scholar; idem., The Great Transformation (Boston, Beacon Press, 1944). See also the discussions in Kaplan, Steven L., Provisioning Paris: merchants and millers in the grain and flour trade during the eighteenth century (Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1984)Google Scholar, and Field, A.J., The problem with neoclassical institutional economics: a critique with special reference to the North/Thomas model of pre-1500 Europe, Explorations in Economic History, XVIII (04, 1981), 174–188CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
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(7) See the discussion in Burke, Peter, Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe (New York, New York University Press, 1978), pp. 201–204, 154–155Google Scholar. For the great cat massacre see Darnton, Robert R., The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History (New York, Vintage Books, 1985)Google Scholar.
(8) Arneson, Richard J., Marxism and secular faith, American Political Science Review, LXXIX (09, 1985), p. 635Google Scholar.
(9) Olson, Mancur C. Jr., The Logic of Collective Action: public goods and the theory of groups (Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1965)Google Scholar.
(10) This problem has been remedied to a significant extent in the recent research by Markoff, John, The social geography of rural revolt at the beginning of the French Revolution, American Sociological Review, L (12, 1985) pp. 761–781CrossRefGoogle Scholar; idem. Contexts and forms of rural revolt : France in 1789, Journal of Conflict Resolution, XXX (June, 1986), pp. 253–289.
(11) Le Roy Ladurie, Emmanuel, Révoltes et contestations rurales de 1675 à 1788, Annales E.S.C., XXIX (janvier–février, 1974), p. 8Google Scholar.
(12) Boutier, Jean, Jacqueries en pays croquant. Les révokes paysannes en Aquitaine (décembre 1789–mars 1790), Annales E.S.C., XXXIV (juillet-août 1979), pp. 762, 766–769Google Scholar.
(13) Boutier, op. cit. pp. 779–781.
(14) But for an argument that levies in Brittany have been exaggerated, see Sutherland, Donald, The Chouans : the social origins of popular counter-Revolution in Upper Brittany, 1770–1795 (Oxford and New York, Oxford University Press, 1982), p. 179Google Scholar. The argument that bocage, métayage and isolated settlement in the West were not conductive to mobilization is double-edged, for it would suggest that neither revolutionary nor counter-revolutionary mobilization would have occurred. Nor is an argument that the contribution of noble leadership made counter-revolutionary mobilization more likely entirely satisfactory (and this is discussed later in the paper).
(15) Lefebvre, Georges, The Great Fear : rural panic in revolutionary France (translated by White, Ann) (New York, Pantheon Books, 1976), p. 176Google Scholar.
(16) Roger Dupuy, La Garde Nationale, op. cit. pp. 182–197. The attacks on chateaux were clustered in January, 1790. There is (happily) some overlap between Boutier and Dupuy in time period studied.
(17) See on preference adjustment, Elster, Jon, Sour Grapes (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp. 109–140CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
(18) Police report from the region around Bergerac in the Guyenne in May, 1773, quoted in Cameron, Iain C., Crime and Repression in the Auvergne and the Guyenne (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1981), p. 67Google Scholar.
(19) Introducing this notion of bargaining space requires only that agents have some notion of their contribution, and of their seigneur's contribution to the relationship, and of the possibility of questioning the nature and degree of seigneurial exactions. ‘[…] The scientific explanation of an action must retain some connection with the agent's intentions, beliefs and expectations, even if it is more sophisticated and intelligent than any an agent could construct. The scientist may use more rigorous or technical concepts to describe the action at issue; however if they illuminate the action at all they must be related to the agent's own vocabulary’. Warnke, Georgia, Hemeneutics and the social sciences: a Gadamerian critique of Rorty, Inquiry, XXVIII (09, 1985), pp. 345–346Google Scholar.
(20) It makes some difference whether the unit of analysis is the peasant community or a juridicial unit since peasant comunities could be solidary, even if the juridicial basis for municipal independence was weak, when the church and parish were primary sites for social interaction, community formation and the management of communal affairs. Both kinds of community may have been as unlikely to produce peasant revolt. Juridicially weak, but religiously cohesive communities, however had more potential for counter-revolution than communities simply juridicially weak. See Bordes, Maurice, L'administration provinciale et municipale en France au XVIIIe siècle (Paris, Société d'Éditions d'Enseignement Supérieur, 1972), pp. 175–198Google Scholar; Jones, Peter M., Parish, seigneurie and the community of inhabitants in southern central France during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Past and Present, LXXXXI (05, 1981), pp. 74–108CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Tackett, Timothy, The West in France in 1788: the peasreligious factor in the origins of the counter revolution, Journal of Modern History, LIV (12 1982), pp. 715–742CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For Skocpol's argument, see Skocpol, States and Social Revolutions, op. cit. p. 120.
(21) Moore, Barrington, The Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy. Lord and peasant in the making of the modern world (Boston, Beacon Press, 1967), pp. 470, 471, fn. 32Google Scholar. Also see North, Douglass C., Structure and Change in Economic History (New York, W. W. Norton and Company, 1981), p. 50Google Scholar, and Tocqueville's argument: de Tocqueville, Alexis, The Old Regime and the French Revolution transl. by Gilbert, Stuart (Garden City, N.Y., Doubleday Books, 1955), p. 30Google Scholar. I note, but do not develop in this article, the possibility that comparisons of services to resources ratios between peasant communities might also contribute to revolt if peasants in one community perceived their ratio to be less favourable than that of some reference community. Resentment among the peasantry to tax exemptions accorded the nobility is another kind of comparison that can independently contribute to revolt. (The interesting feature of such resentment is its implication that peasants assume they share a status with the nobility, perhaps as subjects of the king). These kinds of comparisons might be developed further and incorporated in a more elaborate discussion than is possible here.
(22) There is a substantial literature directly addressing the aristocratic reaction and the questions of noble-bourgeois relations and elite openness. Some of the contributions include Gruder, Vivian, The Royal Provincial Intendants. A governing elite in eighteenth century France (Ithaca, N.Y., Cornell University Press, 1968)Google Scholar; Doyle, William, Was there an aristocratic reaction in pre-revolutionary France, Past and Present, LVII (11, 1972), 97–122CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Bien, David D., La réaction aristocratique avant 1789; l'exemple de l'armée, Annales E.S.C., XXIX (janvier–février, 1974), 23–48Google Scholar; idem., The army in the French enlightenment: reform, reaction and revolution, Past and Present, LXXXV (November, 1979), 68–99; Hufton, Olwen H., The seigneur and the rural community in eighteenth century France. The seigneurial reaction: a reappraisal, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th series XXIX (1979), 21–39CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Le Roy Ladurie, Révoltes et contestations, op. cit.; Furet, François, Penser la Révolution française (Paris, Gallimard, 1978)Google Scholar; Nogaret-Chaussinaud, Guy, La noblesse au XVIIIe siècle : de la féodalité aux lumières (Paris, Hachette, 1976)Google Scholar; Lucas, Colin, Nobles, bourgeois and the origins of the French Revolution, Past and Present, LX (08, 1973), 84–126CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
(23) For evidence of this process see Root, Hilton Lewis, Challenging the seigneurie: community and contention on the eve of the French Revolution, Journal of Modern History, LXVII (12, 1985), 652–681CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
(24) John Markoff, The social geography of rural revolt, loc. cit. p. 761.
(25) See Lucas, Colin S., The problem of the Midi in the French Revolution, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th series, XXVIII (1978), p. 15Google Scholar, and idem., Themes in southern violence after 9 thermidor, in Gywnne Lewis and C. Lucas (eds.), Beyond the Terror. Essays in French regional and social history, 1794–1815 (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp. 191–193 ff.
(26) Sutherland, Donald, The Chouans, and Yves-Marie Bercé, Croquants et nupieds : les soulèvements paysans en France du XVIe siècle au XIXe siècle (Paris, Gallimard, 1974), pp. 54–56Google Scholar.
(27) Bercé, Yves, Histoire des croquants : études des soulèvements populaires au XVIIe siècle dans le sud-ouest de la France (Genève, Droz, 1974), 2 vols, I, p. 131Google Scholar.
(28) Lemercier, Pierre, Les justices seigneuriales de la région parisienne de 1580 à 1789 (Paris, Domat-Montchrestien, 1933), pp. 277–280, 48–57Google Scholar; Bataillon, Jacques-Henri, Les justices seigneuriales du bailliage de Pontoise à la fin de l'ancien régime (Paris, Sirey, 1942), pp. 71, 161–162, 81–86Google Scholar ; Giffard, André, Les justices seigneuriales en Bretagne aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles (Paris, Arthur Rousseau, 1902), pp. 151–228, 252Google Scholar; Villard, Pierre, Les justices seigneuriales dans la Marche (Paris, R. Pichon et R. Durand-Auzias, 1969), pp. 294–303Google Scholar; Root, Hilton L., En Bourgogne, L'État et la communauté rurale, 1661–1789, Annales E.S.C., XXXVII (mars–avril, 1982), 288–302Google Scholar. Sutherland also argues that one reason for local support of the chouans was the protection provided against the depradations of a poorly disciplined Republican army. Sutherland, The Chouans, op. cit. pp. 268–269.
(29) On the tax shifts, see Ardant, Gabriel, Théorie sociologique de l'impôt (Paris, SEVPEN, 1965), 2, p. 881Google Scholar, and Bosher, John F., French Finances 1770–1795. From business to bureaucracy (London and New York, Cambridge University Press, 1970), pp. 1–12Google Scholar. See Hufton, The seigneur and the rural community, pp. 27–28 for the point regarding state visibility and peasants' evaluations. My discussion here draws on the argument that the kind of political activity and its target depends on the attribution of responsibility. See the literature on attribution theory and locus of control in contemporary social psychology, for example: Jones, E.E. et al. , Attributions : perceiving the causes of behaviour (Morristown, N.J., General Learning Press, 1972)Google Scholar. See also Peter Burke, Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe, op. cit. p. 159, and Hufton, Attitudes towards authority, loc. cit. p. 301 for points that illustrate this kind of argument.
(30) See Lewis, The Second Vendée. p. 135, and Sutherland, The chouans, p. 139.
(31) Skocpol, States and Social Revolutions, p. 48.
(32) Harding, Robert R., Anatomy of a Power Elite : the provincial governors of early modern France (Hew Haven and London, Yale University Press, 1978), pp. 199, 213–217Google Scholar; Bonney, Richard, The French civil war, 1649–1653, European Studies Review, VIII (1978), 71–100CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On the confusion between public power and private property, see for example, Bosher, John F., French Finances 1770–1795, op. cit. pp. 100–110, 11Google Scholar.
(33) Carey, John A., Judicial Reform in France before the Revolution of 1789 (Cambridge Mass., Harvard University Press, 1981)Google Scholar.
(34) Beik, William R., Absolutism and Society in Seventeenth Century France : state power and provincial aristocracy in Languedoc (Cambridge and New York, Cambridge University Press, 1985)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
(35) Reinhardt, Steven C., The selective prosecution of crime in Ancien Régime France; theft in the sénéchaussée of Sarlat, European Studies Review, XVI (01, 1986), p. 9Google Scholar.
(36) One issue discussed in the secondary literature is the right to cut wood for personal use and for sale as firewood and timber. I have not pursued this issue further, but a useful starting point for future research might be Colbert's attempts to rationalize timber use in 1669 and its effects on seigneurial-peasant conflicts over use and legal title. See Sallman, Jean-Michel, Les biens communaux et la réaction seigneuriale en Artois, Revue du Nord, LVIII (avril–juin, 1976), pp. 220–223Google Scholar; Bordes, Maurice, La vitalité des communautés provençales au XVIIIe siècle, Provence historique, XXIII (1973), p. 24Google Scholar; Bordes, L'administration provinciale, pp. 191–192; Abel Poitrineau, Heurs et malheurs de l'Auvergne sous la monarchie absolue (1624–1770), in Manry, André Georges, Histoire de l'Auvergne (Toulouse, Edouard Privat, 1974), p. 301Google Scholar; Corvol, André, Forêt et communautés en basse Bourgogne au XVIIIe siècle, Revue historique, CCLVI (1976), 3, pp. 15–36Google Scholar. Wood prices were among the strongest commodity prices in eighteenth-century France (Sallman, p. 223) and were probably important sources of revenues in villages with wooded communal property close to markets. See the community requests (and justifications) for permission to cut wood on their reserves in Antoine, Michel, Le conseil royal des finances au XVIIIe siècle et le registre E3659 des Archives nationales (Genève, Droz, 1973), pp. 13, 199, 200Google Scholar. That permission to cut wood was required from the state, through the local Maîtrise des Eaux et Forêts, is another indication of the importance of the state in defining the autonomy of some peasant communities.
(37) The next paragraph draws on Georges Lefebvre, The movement of prices and the origins of the French Revolution [1937], in Kaplow, Jeffry (ed.), New Perspectives on the French Revolution (New York, John Wiley and Sons, 1965), pp. 103–135Google Scholar; Meuvret, Jean, Le commerce des grains et des farines à Paris et les marchands parisiens à l'époque de Louis XIV, Revue d'histoire moderne et contemporaine, III (1956) 3, 169–203Google Scholar; Goldssmith, J.-L., Remarques sur le régime seigneurial en Haute-Auvergne, in Soboul, Albert (éd.), Contributions à l'histoire de la Révolution française (Paris, Éditions sociales, 1977), 141–158Google Scholar; Tilly, Louise, The food riot as a form of political conflict in France, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, II (Summer 1971), 23–57CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Rose, R.B., Eighteenth-century price riots, the French Revolution and the Jacobin maximum, International Review of Social History, IV (1959,) 3, 432–455Google Scholar.
(38) Hesse has persuasively argued that the form of attacks on chateaux varied with local laws regarding land tenure. In regions where peasants had to present a record to free their land from seigneurial control, attacks on chateaux did not end in the burning of records but in demands for written releases of seigneurial title. In regions where seigneurs had to prove ownership by furnishing records of land titles, attacks included the burning of seigneurial archives. Hesse, Philippe-Jean, Géographie coutumière et révoltes paysannes en 1789, Annales historiques de la Révolution française, LI (1979), 280–306Google Scholar.
(39) The identification of targets is an important clue to the structure of the causal maps that orient a peasant (or any actor) to her world. Consider, for example, how Reddy begins his analysis of a raid by cotton spinners on a royal granary. ‘Why then did these spinners sow the streets with grain after gathering to protest a measure concerning cotton? If they had merely wanted revenge against the intendant of the king, there were any number of likely targets, not the least of which was the intendant's unprotected office where they first gathered. If the price of grain upset them, they could have followed common practice and imposed a price of their own at the grain market. To come to terms with what led them to [the raid] requires that we look beyond prices and markets […]’. Reddy, William M., The textile trade and the language of the crowd at Rouen 1752–1871, Past and Present, LXXIV (02, 1977), pp. 65–66Google Scholar, emphasis in original. I claim only that there will be some subset of entraves and of price-fixing activity that support my inferences about the causal maps orienting protest activity. There may be some or many cases of misinterpretation in which a protest activity is mistakenly linked to a causal map that is not in fact orienting activity. Reddy admits, by implication, that price-fixing was common (‘they could have followed common practice and imposed a price’).
(40) Olwen H. Hufton, The seigneur and the rural community, p. 23. Emphasis added.
(41) See Baehrel, René, Une croissance : la basse Provence rurale (fin XVIe siècle-1789) (Paris, SEVPEN, 1961), p. 452 ff.Google Scholar, and Lron, Pierre, Structures économiques et problèmes sociaux du monde rural dans la France du sud-est (fin du XVIIe siècle-1835) (Paris, Les Belles Lettres, 1966), p. 82Google Scholar.
(42) See Soboul, Albert, La Révolution française et ‘la féodalité’, notes sur le prélèvement féodal, Revue historique, CCXL (juillet-septembre 1968), 33–56Google Scholar.
(43) Lemarchand, Guy, La féodalité et la Révolution française : seigneurie et communauté paysanne (1780–1799), Annales historiques de la Révolution française, LII (octobre–décembre 1980), p. 550Google Scholar.
(44) Compare with François Furet, Penser la révolution, pp. 134, 135, fn. 9.
(45) Goubert, Pierre, Le paysan et la terre : seigneurie, tenure et exploitation, in Labrousse, Ernest (éd.), Histoire économique et sociale de la France (Paris, Presses Universitaires de France, 1970), 1, p. 126Google Scholar; Frêche, Georges, Toulouse et la région Midi-Pyrénées au siècle des lumières (vers 1670–1789) (Paris, Éditions Cujas, 1974), p. 512Google Scholar.
(46) Jacquart, Jacques, La crise rurale en Île-de-France (Paris, Armand Colin, 1974), pp. 430, 445Google Scholar. Bastier, Jean, La féodalité au siècle des lumières dans la région de Toulouse (1730–1790) (Paris, Bibliothèque nationale, 1975), p. 278Google Scholar.
(47) Hufton, The seigneur and the rural community, p. 26. See also the important article by Poitrineau, Abel, Aspects de la crise des justices seigneuriales dans l'Auvergne du XVIIIe siècle, Revue historique de droit français et étranger, 4th series, XXXVIII (1961), 552–570Google Scholar.
(48) Taylor, George V., Revolutionary and nonrevolutionary content in the Cahiers of 1789: an interim report, French Historial Studies, VII (Fall, 1972), pp. 489–490Google Scholar. Taylor does not distinguish, however, between intentions towards the seigneurial system and intentions towards the state and government, and focusses most of his attention on the degree of change demanded in structures and processes of government.
(49) Lucas, The problem of the Midi, (fn. 25).
(50) Arguments of this kind invoking a crisis of meaning can draw on the arguments of Geertz regarding the orienting function of cultural systems and the cultural strain induced if a cultural system is radically challenged. See Geertz, Clifford, Ideology as a cultural system, in Apter, David E. (ed.), Ideology and Discontent (Glencoe, New York, Free Press, 1964), pp. 63–64Google Scholar.
(51) This distinction draws on Moore. See Barrington Moore, The Social Origins, pp. 475–476.
(52) See, for example, Soboul, Albert (ed.), Contributions à l'histoire paysanne de la Révolution française (Paris, Éditions sociales, 1977)Google Scholar.
(53) See, for example, Yves Bercé, Histoire des croquants, op. cit.; Pillorget, René, Les mouvements insurrectionnels de Provence entre 1598 et 1715 (Paris, Pédome, 1975)Google Scholar; Foisil, Madeline, La révolte des nu-pieds et les révoltes normandes de 1039 (Paris, Presses Universitaires de France, 1970)Google Scholar; Garlan, Yvon and Nièvres, Charles, Les révoltes bretonnes de 1675 : papier timbré et bonnets rouges (Paris, Éditions sociales, 1975)Google Scholar; Meyer, Jean and Dupuy, Roger, Bonnets rouges et blancs bonnets, Annales de Bretagne, LXXXII (1975) 4, pp. 402–426Google Scholar (an article in a special issue on the Breton revolt of 1675); Salmon, J.H.M., Venality of office and popular sedition in seventeenth-century France, Past and Present, XXXVII (07, 1967), 21–43CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
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(55) Dontenwill, Serge, Une seigneurie sous l'ancien régime (Roanne, France, Horvath, 1973), p. 105 ffGoogle Scholar.
(56) Castan, Yves, Mentalités rurale et urbaine à la fin de l'ancien régime dans le ressort du parlement de Toulouse d'après les sacs à procès criminels (1730–1790), in Abbiateci, A. (éd.), Crimes et criminalité en France sous l'ancien régime, 17e–18e siècles (Paris, Armand Colin, 1971), pp. 122–124Google Scholar ; Bloch, Maurice, L'individualisme agraire dans la France du XVIIIe siècle [1930] (Saint Pierre de Salerme, G. Montfort, 1978), for example, pp. 344–345Google Scholar.
(57) See Hufton, Olwen H., The Poor of Eighteenth Century France, 1750–1789 (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1974)Google Scholar, and Foucault, Michel, Discipline and Punish : the birth of the prison (transl. by Sheridan, Alan) (New York, Vintage Books, 1979), pp. 82–84Google Scholar.
(58) See Jones, Peter M., La République au Village in the Southern Massif Central, Historical Journal, XXIII (12, 1980), pp. 798–812Google Scholar; idem., Common rights and agrarian individualism in the Southern Massif Central, 1750–1850, in Gywnne Lewis and Colin Lucas (eds.), Beyond the Terror. Essays in French regional and social history, 1794–1815 (Cambridge and New York, Cambridge University Press, 1983); Lewis, Gywnne, The Second Vendée. The continuity of counter-revolution in the department of the Gard, 1789–1815 (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1978), pp. 126, 130 ff.Google Scholar ; Hood, James N., Revival and mutation of old rivalries in revolutionary France, Past and Present, LXXXII (02, 1979), 82–115CrossRefGoogle Scholar ; Tilly, Charles, Local conflicts in the Vendée before the rebellion of 1793, French Historical Studies, II (Fall, 1961), 209–231CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On community solidarity, see also Forster, Robert, The ‘world’ between seigneur and peasant, in Rosbottom, Ronald C. (ed.), Studies in Eighteenth Century Culture, V (1976), pp. 417–418Google Scholar. See also Lemarchand's discussion of the emergence of oligarchal dynasties within the administration of peasant communities, especially in Provence, and the restriction of participation in general meetings of the community to peasants who paid taxes, thus excluding the poor. Lemarchand, Seigneurie et communauté paysanne, pp. 545–548. For a discussion of the effects of changes during the revolution in distributing opportunities across pre-existing competitive social networks in urban settings, see Higgs, David, Ultraroyalism in Toulouse: from its origins to the revolution of 1830 (Baltimore, John Hopkins University Press, 1973), pp. 25–26, 30Google Scholar ; and Hunt, Lynn A., Revolution and Urban Politics in Revolutionary France; Troyes and Reims, 1785–1790 (Stanford, Stanford University Press, 1976)Google Scholar.
(59) For a more detailed discussion of this point, see Hudson Meadwell, Free-Riding, Abstaining, and Consent in Collective Choice: the interpretation of non-contributions to collective action (manuscript available from author).
(60) The following discussion of moral economy is developed in the specific context of explaining hierarchical solidarity. This limitation should be kept in mind since moral economy approaches also inform the analysis of collective action within groups in which individuals are more interchangeable than in a hierarchical community and social interaction thus more likely to be influenced by norms of reciprocity. For a brilliant analysis of substitutability of persons, group formation and interaction, and consequent political outcomes, see Rogowski, Ronald, Rational Legitimacy. A theory of political support (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1974)Google Scholar. Also see the brief discussion of substitutability in Fortes, Meyer A., The structure of unilineal descent groups, American Anthropologist, LV (01–03, 1953), p. 36)Google Scholar. A group in which individuals are interchangeable and who share a fate in any sequence of substitutions over positions in a division of labor is a mechanically solidary group. Suppose we have a group with two disjoint subsets in which substitution is asymmetric—all of one subset can become members of the other subset but not vice versa—and in which members of different subsets do not share a fate. I call this group a hierarchical group and its solidarity I call hierarchical solidarity. Consider a different kind of group, an organic group (with organic solidarity): substitution produces neither interchangeably nor asymmetry. Upon substitution, individuals can end up in different subsets but subset membership does not affect their life chances. These three types of groups are based on different kinds of division of labor: simple division of labor, hierarchical division of labor and interdependent division of labor. The interdependent type may be stable, if indeed substitution does not affect life chances, or, otherwise, if the society has no norms of equity and individuals do not make interpersonal comparisons. If such norms and comparisons are present, a condition for stability may be social acceptance of an ordinal theory of justice. These distinctions are related to Rogowski's analysis in the following way: hierarchical and organic divisions of labor are subsets of Rogowki's class of wholly stratified, segmented societies, and a mechanical (simple) division of labor is a wholly interchangeable nonfactionalized society. (See Rogowski, Rational Legitimacy, 143–151, 55–75). I should note that interchangeability in this argument has an arbitrary lower boundary since substitutability and social reproduction is determined over a social division of labour without attention to sexual reproduction.
(61) Lévi-Strauss argues that ‘the logical connotation of the idea of community […] is itself dependent upon the effective solidarity of the group’. Solidarity, itself, must be explained. Lévi-Strauss, Claude, The Elementary Structures of Kinship (Boston, Beacon Press, 1969), p. 46Google Scholar.
(62) A neoclassical argument can incorporate coercion but its function is very limited, essentially to eliminate free-riding upon an agreed upon institutional arrangement. See, for example, North, Douglass C. and Thomas, Robert P., The Rise of the western world: a new economic history (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1973)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The neoclassical argument that treats the services provided by lords as public goods has been effectively criticized by Fenoltea, Stepano, The rise and fall of a theoretical model: the manorial system, Journal of Economic History, XXXV (06, 1975), pp. 386–409CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Another way to challenge the neoclassical position here would be to grant their assumptions and then show they imply an impossibility result (à la Arrow). Technical restrictions on the domain of choice which avoid impossibility results can then be argued to imply unjustified substantive limitations on the choice domain of peasants. Peasant mobility here serves as a proxy for voting.
(63) One obvious response here would be to argue that all social life requires norms and authority; otherwise, social life would degenerate into anarchy. (For a classic statement, see Talcott, , Parsons, , The Structure of Social Action (New York, McGraw-Hill, 1937), pp. 43–106)Google Scholar. Therefore, it is nonsensical to argue A. This argument turns on a comparison between anarchy and order and on the functional value of authority in stabilizing social life. But every stabilizing system of order simultaneously distributes life chances within a collectivity. It is this relationship of social order to social distribution, or of hierarchy to community, that fuels the dispute over moral economy, for supporting community can tacitly legitimize hierarchy.
(64) Brocheux, Pierre, Moral economy or political economy? The peasants are always rational, Journal of Asian Studies, XLII (08, 1983), p. 794Google Scholar.
(65) See, for example, Ronald Rogowski, Structure, growth and power, pp. 275–726; Popkin, Samuel L., The Rational Peasant : the political economy of rural society in Vietnam (Berkeley, Calif., University of California Press, 1979), pp. 1–31Google Scholar.
(66) Sutherland, The Chouans, pp. 168, 178.
(67) See Denis, Michel, Les royalistes de la Mayenne et de monde moderne (XIXe–XXe siècles) (Paris, Klincksieck, 1977), p. 49Google Scholar; Bois, Paul, Paysans de l'Ouest; des structures économiques et sociales aux options politiques depuis l'époque révolutionnaire dans la Sarthe (Paris, Mouton, 1960), pp. 580–624Google Scholar; Tilly, Charles, The Vendée (Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1964), pp. 305–320Google Scholar. See also Hutt, Maurice, Chouannerie and Counter-Revolution : Puisaye, the princes and the British government in the 1790s (Cambridge and New York, Cambridge University Press, 1983) I, pp. 1–22Google Scholar.
(68) Sutherland, The Chouans, pp. 176–177.
(69) Mitchell, Harvey, Resistance to the Revolution in western France, Past and Present, LXIII (05, 1974), pp. 115, 114Google Scholar.
(70) We might say that an outcome (e.g. organization) is imposed when organizational participation goes against personal preferences, or when the opportunity structure in which constrained choice occurs is itself a consequence of the earlier activity of organizational leaders. Thus, to say that this constrained choice is a rational choice on the part of individuals because it leaves individuals better off than another alternative in the choice set is not very satisfactory. It is more important to assess whether the choice was imposed, not whether it was ‘rational’ and to specify the historical and situational factors that define the feasible boundaries of the choice set. Earlier activity by superiors that contributed to produce the constrained opportunity structure may have to have some property of intended constraint if the opportunity structure is to be termed imposed. This is not to say that intended constraints alone explain the opportunity structure, only that an explanation of the opportunity structure would have to include intended constraints. My treatment of exchange is not open to the usual criticisms of exchange theory, namely that exchange is assumed to be voluntary. See Lively, Jack, The limits of exchange theory, in Barry, Brian M. (ed.), Power and Political Theory (London and New York, MacMillan, 1976), pp. 1–13Google Scholar.
(71) Denis, Les royalistes, p. 58.
(72) Le Goff, T.J.A. and Sutherland, D.M.G., The social origins of counter-Revolution in Western France, Past and Present, LXXXXIX (1893), pp. 65–87Google Scholar.
(73) Mitchell, Resistance to the Revolution, p. 113.
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(75) Fox-Genovese, Elizabeth, The many faces of moral economy, Past and Present, LVIII (02, 1973), pp. 166–167Google Scholar. For Thompson's elaborations on moral economy and hegemony, see Thompson, Edward P., The moral economy of the English crowd in the eighteenth century, Past and Present, L (02, 1971), 76–136CrossRefGoogle Scholar; idem., Patrician society, plebian culture, Journal of Social History, VII (Summer, 1974), 382–405, and idem., Eighteenth-century English society: class struggle without class?, Social History, III (May, 1978), 133–165.
(76) Meyer, Jean, Une mutation manquée : de la révolution politique aux débuts du monde industriel (1789–1880), in Delumeau, Jean (éd.), Histoire de la Bretagne (Toulouse, Privat, 1969), p. 386Google Scholar, and Sée, Henri, Les troubles agraires en haute Bretagne, 1790–91, Bulletin d'histoire économique de la Révolution (1920–1921), 231–373Google Scholar.
