Democratizing Forgiveness in Revolutionary France, 1789-1799

FAIN: FEL-281365-22

Katie L. Jarvis
University of Notre Dame (Notre Dame, IN 46556-4635)

Research and writing leading to a book on how processes of political, social, and economic reconciliation and forgiveness were reinvented during the French Revolution.

Democratizing Forgiveness analyzes how the French revolutionaries refashioned forgiveness from 1789 to 1799. It argues that, amid conflict, the French Revolution forged modern politics and society by reinventing reconciliation. The revolutionaries enacted a cooperative social contract by developing new reparative judicial practices, religious beliefs, economic relations, and political imaginings. This project explores how citizens repaired broken bonds by arbitrating local disputes, forgiving personal loans, and settling commercial debt in court. It also considers how citizens reconceptualized reconciliation through sacramental confession, innovative religious cults, and the education of youth. Through quotidian relationships, revolutionary forgiveness became both a brake on individual conflict and a motor for societal change.

Associated Products

The Frontage Road to Nineteenth-Century Capitalism: How Local Justice Transformed Credit Relationships in Revolutionary Paris (Conference Paper/Presentation)
Title: The Frontage Road to Nineteenth-Century Capitalism: How Local Justice Transformed Credit Relationships in Revolutionary Paris
Author: Katie Jarvis
Abstract: My talk examines how the state repaired economic relations between private citizens through neighborhood tribunals in the 1790s. Court mandated repayment schedules sought to rehabilitate broken financial relationships and to create space for offending citizens to economically survive without ruin. This chapter illustrates how litigants’ collective judicial tactics transformed the socioeconomic relationships central to urban living. These included rental relationships, commercial relationships, work relationships, and even friendships. Dovetailing statistical outcomes from the rulings with litigants’ discursive descriptions of their debts, my research reveals that the ability to efficiently and affordably resolve disputes at revolutionary courts rebalanced the credit relationships that controlled the Parisian rental market and consumer sales. As a result, personal and commercial debt became more distinct from one another in ways that would underpin nineteenth-century capitalism in France.
Date: 10/21/22
Conference Name: The France and Francophone Workshop, University of Chicago

“Principal Tenants, Subtenants, and Revolutionary Justice: Recalibrating Economic Power in Rental Relationships” (Conference Paper/Presentation)
Title: “Principal Tenants, Subtenants, and Revolutionary Justice: Recalibrating Economic Power in Rental Relationships”
Author: Katie Jarvis
Abstract: This paper dissects audiences before Parisian justices of the peace to reveal how city dwellers overturned traditional power dynamics between lessors and lessees during the Revolution. Prior to the nineteenth century, principal tenants of urban “houses” (who were mostly artisans and shopkeepers) generally came from the same socioeconomic background as their subtenants (who were other artisans, small merchants, and laborers). Individuals who assumed the role of principal tenant, or the main tenant responsible for remitting all subtenants’ rent to the building’s owner, did so to gain spatial rather than economic advantages. Being a principal tenant offered an individual the first choice of living, working, and commercial spaces within a building. Principal tenants rarely expected to make money from subletting the remaining rooms. On the contrary, they faced significant risks and potential losses in collecting rent and state taxes from delinquent subtenants. However, following the invention of the revolutionary justices of the peace, principal tenants seized the new possibility to quickly and affordably bring contests over small sums like a single term’s rent for the cheap rooms. The use and looming threat of this strategy appears to have truncated lessee’s repayment windows for backrent, which was one of the most common and significant urban expenses. In effect, the justice of the peace instituted new boundaries between lessors and lessees in rental relationships and lessors deployed state institutions to gain a firm upper-hand for the first time. In the long run, lessors’ newfound advantages made it possible to conceive of rental housing as a profitable investment and as arena of entrepreneurial activity in the nineteenth century.
Date: 3/17/23
Conference Name: Society for French Historical Studies/ Western Society for French History Conference

A Revolution in Popular Credit: How Parisians Reconfigured Local Relationships and Market Dynamics through the Justice of the Peace” (Conference Paper/Presentation)
Title: A Revolution in Popular Credit: How Parisians Reconfigured Local Relationships and Market Dynamics through the Justice of the Peace”
Author: Katie Jarvis
Abstract: This was an invited talk.
Date: 10/16/2023
Conference Name: Histoire de Paris, Séminaire GRHS, IHMC, IDHE.S, CRH, at l’Université du Québec à Montréal and Videoconference to Université Paris 1 – Panthéon-Sorbonne,

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