The Jacobins, led by Robespierre, were a bunch of demagogues who spent their days filibustering at the
Estates-General, a quasi-parliament without any power.
Still, such criticisms are offset by the breadth of sources used in The Catholicisms of Coutances, and among these sources perhaps the most convincing are the cahiers de doleances that were sent on behalf of the Third Estate to the
Estates-General of 1789.
King Louis XVI called a meeting of the
Estates-General for May 1789, the
As its title indicates, the scope of the work is the two years prior to the summoning of the
Estates-General, which precipitated the French Revolution of 1789.
In the fevered atmosphere caused by the monarchy's financial collapse and the elections to the
Estates-General assembly all the old resentments at noble tax exemptions and social privileges suddenly surfaced.
59-99) Renwick analyses the text as an exercise in polemic, noting how Voltaire advances an ostensibly incontrovertible thesis (the Parlement is a supreme court, not a latter-day
Estates-General) while deploying Pyrrhonist arguments ('tout change') to undermine any legitimizing historical basis for the Parlement's increasingly aggressive remonstrances.
This leads him to pick out events Pinagot was likely to have heard or known about, including the cahiers for the
Estates-General, chouannerie, periods of dearth and popular protest (of which an account is given), conflicts over the local church, the impingement of the outside world in the invasions of 1815 and 1870-1, but not Napoleon.
To help get him out of the financial glue, the king recalled the
Estates-General, an assembly that had not met for more than 150 years.
The third estate's reconstitution of the
Estates-General as a National Assembly (p.
It examines the manner in which the limited aspirations for the
Estates-General of 1789 became transformed into the much broader movement that came to be known as the French Revolution.
Section three, consisting of three 'chapters, focuses on popular pamphlets; the voices of the peasantry (an issue that has been more amply addressed by John Markoff, Gilbert Shapiro, and Peter Jones); and a final, quite interesting chapter on the array of local meetings and assemblies that took place across France between May 1788 and January 1789, during the period when the form of the upcoming
Estates-General was being vigorously debated, particularly among members of the Third Estate.