As a general rule, rural communities did not expect to be pleased to hear from the authorities. Rarely were deliveries of official correspondence good news: more often, they contained information about obligations—particularly taxes—and other administrative details. The news that went out in August of 1788, however, was a major exception: Louis XVI announced that a meeting of the Estates General would commence on May 1, 1789. In preparation for this event, every community in the country was to draw up a list of grievances and complaints—the cahiers de doléances—to address “the needs of the state, the reform of abuses, the establishment of a permanent and lasting order … [for] the general prosperity of the kingdom and [for] the good of each and every of His Majesty's subjects.” Flattered to have been asked for their opinion, the king's subjects in all three estates—clergy, nobility, and commoners—in town and country and in every province, set about the task of solving the kingdom's problems.

The enthusiasm and sincerity with which this was done is particularly poignant in the parish cahiers of small rural localities, of which many thousands have survived, an unparalleled expression of popular opinion. If valid caveats have been raised concerning their legitimacy as sources, citing the existence of model cahiers, the influence of members of the literate elite, and the potential for intimidation by local power holders, the negative repercussions of this were limited.

When the English agronomist Arthur Young traveled through the French countryside on the eve of the French Revolution, he was aghast at what he perceived as an insufficiency of news circulating in rural areas. Arriving at Thierry-sur-Marne on July 4, 1789, Young wrote that he wished to see a newspaper “in a period so interesting to France,” but that not one was to be found. “Here are two parishes, and some thousands of inhabitants, and not a newspaper to be seen by a traveler, even in a moment when all ought to be in anxiety. What stupidity, poverty, and want of circulation! This people hardly deserve to be free; and should there be even a slightly vigorous attempt to keep them otherwise, it can hardly fail of succeeding.”

The revolutionary elite responded to evidence of rural lassitude and dissent with preventive solutions and reactionary explanations. If the deputies of the National Assembly professed difficulty understanding why the good farmers of the nation were wary of political change, they wasted little time in addressing the problem. To counteract the ignorance they perceived to be the underlying issue, some deputies struck committees to ensure that decrees were arriving in the provinces, while others discussed translating them for regions where French was not everyone's mother tongue. Members of the Assembly frequently pointed to the improvement of roads and the augmentation of the postal service as key to the solution. Civic missionaries traveled the countryside “correcting misunderstandings” and spreading the gospel of the Revolution, and an increasingly radical political culture translated political meaning into visual symbols and pageantry. Where government left off, private citizens willingly took up the noble task of enlightening the unenlightened, as political clubs and newspaper editors targeted the rural majority with propaganda of varying degrees of subtlety.

Despite such determined efforts to counteract dissenting views with education, the problem was not a lack of information. For those interested in political news and change, there was plenty available, and from competing sources; rural political apathy may in fact have been exacerbated by an excess of information. A lively oral culture existed in the French countryside, so a certain proportion of political opinions were bound to be disparaging.

Faced with reports of verbal dissent emanating from all points of the nation, revolutionary authorities responded by specifying the circumstances under which counterrevolutionary talk could be prosecuted in the courts. Initially, and long before the fall of the monarchy, legislators simply substituted the concept of nation for that of king in the crime of lèse-majesté, creating a supreme court, the Haute Cour nationale, to deal with a form of treason now referred to as lèse-nation. The concept was in fact not new: a form of lèse-majesté against the public good had been described in earlier centuries, but the Haute Cour was not designed to deal with the volume and variety of dissent that would emerge in the months and years that followed.