This case study investigates the process of revolutionary social change at the crucial point in its genesis where diffuse and unarticulated frustrations, irritations, and antagonisms are first articulated and are translated into a kind of incipient reform ideology. Although this phenomenon, which some have termed 'integrative mass unrest,' has been identified as the necessary precondition of revolution, it has never been studied historically, largely because the evidence of the transfer of opinion from the individual level to mass consensus is lacking in most instances. However, in the case of the French Revolution, the pre-revolutionary lists of grievances (cahiers de doleances) drawn up at the village level provide an interesting and important exception, allowing us to glimpse not only the consensus formation process, but also to analyze precisely the content of that consensus once it had emerged. This dissertation does this by relating first the consensus formation process and then the consensus itself to the social context of increasing hostility to the old regime which attended the convocation of the Estates General It demonstrates further that, in the Departement of the Gard, the convocation and the process of consensus formation which it inspired occurred at the critical convergence of long-term economic, political, religious (sectarian), and social malaise with the sudden onset of myriad short-term catastrophes. This conjuncture of crises, occurring as it did at the precise moment of the convocation, had a decisive effect on radicalizing the content of consensus and of insuring that the people of N(')imes formulated consistently revolutionary solutions to local and national problems / acase@tulane.edu
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:TULANE/oai:http://digitallibrary.tulane.edu/:tulane_24386 |
| Date | January 1982 |
| Contributors | Allen, Edward A (Author) |
| Publisher | Tulane University |
| Source Sets | Tulane University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Rights | Access requires a license to the Dissertations and Theses (ProQuest) database., Copyright is in accordance with U.S. Copyright law |
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