L’adaptation du jacobinisme au monde rural : la politisation populaire dans les villages de la Haute-Garonne, 1790-1795

Abstract

Jacobin clubs in rural areas were not necessarily the short-lived and politically strategic creations of the year II that scholars have often imagined them to be, nor were they solely a forum for the better-off peasants and rural elite. In the department of the Haute-Garonne, political clubs were formed in a considerable number of rural communities, the result of both the villagers’ thirst for information and of their desire to participate in the new political regime. The thirty-one membership lists examined here reveal that, in addition to large landowners and other cultural and political intermediaries, the majority of participants in rural clubs were from the agricultural and artisanal sectors. These same documents also provide information concerning the evolution of club membership over time, and evidence suggests that the initiative to form a political club often came from villagers themselves, rather than from outside. The last part of the study uses the minutes of a rural club, in the village of Mourvilles-Hautes, to explore the ideas of its peasant members and the way in which they reinterpreted Jacobinism.