The rural municipalities of 1787: the nobility, seigneurial regime and revolutionary politics.

In 1787, the French monarchy invited rural residents to elect municipalités. These village administrations formed the lowest rung of a broader reform bringing the landed classes into provincial assemblies. The king and his ministers sought to enlist the support of royal subjects for fiscal reform. The monarchy's archives regarding the rural municipalities bear directly on debates about the privileged orders in the origins of the Revolution. Nobles took part by the Enlightenment. They provoked the crisis of the regime in resisting royal policies in 1787 and 1788. The nobles nevertheless opposed the rural municipalities. They regarded the village elections as subversive of the jurisdictional rights of lords on which the monarchy was based. The rural municipalities thus represented a confrontation between the liberal ideals of many nobles and their underlying attachment to the political hierarchy of the old regime. As a result of this confrontation, a number of nobles became willing to attenuate the seigneurial regime and permit the peasants to participate in local government. These nobles subsequently played a role in opening the way to revolutionary change in 1789. Changes in the nobles' political attitudes thus resulted less from liberal ideas than from the social conflicts of the period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]