Jill Maciak Walshaw. A Show of Hands for the Republic

Well off the main roads or up in the mountains, with literacy low and people speaking something besides French, how were big national questions discussed, if they were discussed at all? As those at the centers of power found themselves concerned about the ideas circulating among the educated, were they also paying attention to what people were thinking and saying in the countryside far from Paris? Jill Maciak Walshaw explores several departmental archives and synthesizes a lot of previous literature searching for answers to these questions in the southwest of France and in the central Pyrenees, both on the eve of the French Revolution and deep into it. Her book is a lively guide to the issues and her new evidence is instructive and also tantalizing. Walshaw ably charts the paths through which information flowed. Written messages were sent out and orally relayed. Official notices could be posted or announced from the pulpit. News was carried by talkative travelers, exchanged at churches, workplaces, and markets, and discussed at local assemblies. The authorities saw cabarets and inns as places where locals mixed with soldiers, peddlers, notaries, messengers, and carters. Grievances might be expressed in judicial venues, through petitioning, or as collective disturbance. The authorities commonly claimed local people were mostly obedient and ill-informed, if occasionally stirred up by “instigators.” When serious trouble occurred, they looked for presumed ringleaders said to be injecting some dangerous discourse into the local scene.

Archaeology · Media studies · Political science · Power (physics) · Pulpit · Sociology · Spanish Civil War · European Political History Analysis · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies