« Nous ne désobéirons pas à Sa Majesté, mais nous refusons de rester » : les perceptions du droit, de la justice et d’une « juste autorité » dans les pétitions de paysans russes de la seconde moitié du xviiie siècle

Abstract

This article presents a case study of the perceptions and ideas of justice and just authority in eighteenth-century Russia. The analysis focuses on factory peasants’ uprisings in the second half of the eighteenth century. Drawing on peasant petitions and other documents, it shows how peasants perceived unjust authority and describes the practices they used to (re)establish justice and the nature of their communications with the authorities. In their conceptions and practices of justice, peasants combined irrational utopianism and “naive monarchism” with highly evolved pragmatism in handling the law and communicating with the authorities. This leads to the conclusion that, concerning justice, Russian peasants were not at all passive toward authority and possessed their own well-defined set of ideas and practices.