A tale of two revolutions

The peasants of Avançon had had enough. And so they rebelled. It was April 1789: several months earlier, their village, nestled in an alpine valley near the regional centre of Gap, had like every other French village been summoned to express their collective grievances. For the first time since 1614, an elected national body, an Estates-General, had been summoned by royal decree, with notice that what the people wrote in their cahiers de doléances , their registers of grievances, would reach King Louis XVI’s ears for redress.

The offer came in a moment of deep crisis. At the top of society, there was deadlock about reforms to taxation vital to stave off state bankruptcy. This was why, after two years of manoeuvring, the kingdom had blown the dust off the remedy of an Estates-General, empowered to make changes nobody else could agree on. But the crisis at the bottom of society was even deeper. Months of snowbound winter had battened on a country fearful of how to cope with the latest of several poor harvests. Intensifying shortages and rising prices in the spring fed rumours that the rich and powerful were plotting to starve the people into submission.

The revolutionaries . who took power in Paris betrayed the hopes of the masses, . laying the path to violence

So the people acted. The peasants of Avançon launched their own local revolution. Their feudal seigneur, the overlord entitled to a share of all they produced, was a nobleman and judge in the regional court at