Cahiers de doléances

And it goes back, it's interesting because with the Gilets Jaunes following that, there was a whole movement to produce a whole raft of, you know, these are our grievances.

The French call it Cahiers de Doléances, which goes back to the French Revolution, where every parish, every village was supposed to produce in advance of the 1789 assembly that was summoned by the king for the first time in living memory.

They were supposed to turn up with their list of grievances.

And we know how it ended.

And in the spring of 1789, the crown asked the whole country to write down its grievances.

The Cahier, uh, and I, I've, uh, my son gets on me a little bit with my French, and I know he might be listening, uh, right now, but the, the, the Cahiers de Doléances, the book of complaints, what did the ordinary French people actually ask for? How much of it did they get?

And, uh, yes, well, two very important questions, and, uh- As you say, in referring to these boo- uh, books of grievances or cahiers, the, um, it's an extraordinary resource because, uh, part of the procedure for the coming together of the Estates General that Louis XVI had, had called to give him advice, uh, a, a representative body, was that communities across the kingdom needed to meet together to, uh, to work out their, their grievances and s- and suggestions for the monarch.

So there are, there are thousands, many thousands of these still in existence.

They are spreading pamphlets about the slavery issue.

So when the call comes for the Estates General, that's one of the many issues that is sort of out there and which Brissot and other prominent people are doing their best to get into the discourse that goes into the Cahiers.

If you look at the Cahiers de Doléance, these lists of grievances, they're not a whole lot of mentions of the slavery issue.

But the ones that are in there are interesting.

There are a number from the clergy, for example, and often you have...

You have some from places where we know particular individuals active in the abolition campaign were present.

The philosopher Condorcet, for example, gets it.

critique of slavery into the Cahiers in his rural district of Mantes.