Regulating Conflict through the Petition

Abstract

The petition considered here was the collective representation by peasants and workers during the second third of the nineteenth century. It was a form of action that atrophied with the Great Reform. The petition was addressed to autocracy, it invoked its might and mercy, it affirmed its law and it denoted craven submission. It accused a mendacious bureaucracy of disfiguring the sublime majesty of autocracy, and it proposed instead another autocracy, in direct relation with the peasantry. It legitimized autocracy rather than challenged it; as such it was one of the latter’s instruments of social regulation. The petition was composed, not by the peasants themselves, but by others who knew or claimed to know the mind of autocracy and the manner of pleasing it.